


Dig Two Graves

by Liangnui



Series: Inhale [6]
Category: Naruto, 陈情令 | The Untamed (TV), 魔道祖师 - 墨香铜臭 | Módào Zǔshī - Mòxiāng Tóngxiù
Genre: Action/Adventure, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Drama, Everyone Needs A Hug, F/M, Family Feels, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, International Murder Road Trip, M/M, Major character death is Wei Wuxian, Multi, Murder, Necromancy, POV Outsider, Revenge, So he'll be fine, So much stabbing, Sunshot Campaign (Módào Zǔshī)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2021-02-20
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:36:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 11
Words: 70,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27114790
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Liangnui/pseuds/Liangnui
Summary: For the death of her clan, Tomoe declared vengeance. As a samurai, she saw no reason to stop simply because a handful of her targets fled across the sea to preserve their lives.(A divergence/AU fromCatch Your Breath.)
Relationships: Lán Zhàn | Lán Wàngjī/Wèi Yīng | Wèi Wúxiàn, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Original Character(s)/Original Character(s)
Series: Inhale [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/218171
Comments: 233
Kudos: 202





	1. Impulse

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, everyone! Welcome to the opening chapter of _Dig Two Graves_ , which is the story I've been writing in a fairly nonstop manner for several months. In my head, at least. The physical writing part and production of prose has been extremely hit-and-miss-and-miss-again for most of that same span. To get around the writer's block plaguing me for the crime of getting sucked into a world-building black hole, this story begins _in medias res_. 
> 
> This entire story takes place in a frankencanon of mostly-typical proportions, wherein the general plot follows the trajectory of _The Untamed_ , but the story isn't entirely confined to members of the Chinese cultivation sects. There's a whole empire out there. 
> 
> Chinese is rendered in italics for native Japanese speakers. When we come across a character bilingual in the other direction, that order will be reversed.
> 
> (The specific jumping-off point from the CYB side of things is chapter 4 of _The B-Plot_ , which serves as a character primer for our first chapter's Japanese-speaking trio.)

In the depths of an autumn out of the great poems, the pink sunset of Yunmeng disappeared under thick, gray clouds that pressed smoke down on its famous lotus lakes. Thunder rumbled down the river and dragged the shroud of inevitable rain behind it. Ahead of the storm, Lotus Pier burned like a funeral pyre. 

Wataru wasn’t a poetic soul most of the time, but unseasonable cold trickled down his spine. Far be it from him to complain about weather changes that beat the mosquitoes into the ground, but—ugh, there just wasn’t any to downplay the smoke, even in his head. There _was_ no good news with a fire like that. Never was. 

Upstairs, Tomoe probably had the window open. She spent more time in the house when it rained, but she hadn’t said anything since he brought tea a few hours ago. He’d poked his head up the stairs twice, but found the door still half-ajar each time. 

If Tomoe left—to get out of her head or to find Shinta, or both—she would’ve told him. Maybe while halfway out a window and in the dead of night, but she always did. Same as she did everywhere else they’d traveled, chasing ghosts. 

Not real ghosts. Not like the ones being made today. Maybe. 

He’d seen the first Wen cultivators spill out into town over an hour ago and closed the gates. Tomoe could get out if she wanted to by just leaping over the wall, and Shinta could get back in, but Wataru was happiest when his feet were planted firmly on the ground. Closing the gates would at least stop people from seeing into their little excuse for a courtyard. 

Wataru might be foreign-born and bred, but there was no way he was letting this safehouse get ransacked to feed _another_ foreign army. Even if he didn’t care about the expense to replace everything—which soldiers inevitably broke—there was every chance that a Wen invasion would expose him, Tomoe, and Shinta as Nihonjin. 

Assuming that they didn’t just have to run back to Shanghai, that could be quite uncomfortable. Because Tomoe would probably cut several people in half (again) and track blood into inconvenient buildings (again) and make them scrap yet another perfectly nice set of robes (again). She needed to carry other pairs of shoes. 

There was no war _he’d_ ever seen that kept neatly to its own borders, so Wataru sighed and checked under the stairs for their qiankun bags. 

Black-with-red, blue-with-red, and plain green were all accounted for. Honestly, the qiankun pouches themselves were probably worth more than their contents. As long as no one asked precisely where he’d gotten his hands on them—and why they had no ornamentation from any cultivation sect—Wataru figured they were as safe as…

Well. Not as safe as _anyone,_ given what was happening just out of direct line of sight. The Wen forces targeted the Yunmeng Jiang cultivation sect first, sure, but Wataru didn’t think for an _instant_ that they wouldn’t camp on top of the bloodied remains of their target like hungry tigers. Wen victory meant Wen territorial expansion, and rich people who got stab-happy didn’t tend to treat less powerful people that well. The head of the Wen sect-and-clan, Wen Ruohan, was notorious for his total lack of patience and for enabling his petty, spoiled sons, so Wataru wasn’t optimistic about _that_ whole situation. 

And Shinta still hadn’t checked in since breakfast. Even if Wataru knew how well that kid could get around, his nerves might finally settle if their entire family was under one roof. 

Wataru rubbed at his eyes. Tomoe definitely had the window open upstairs if the smoke was sneaking into the house. 

_“Three monks have no water to drink,”_ Wataru said after a couple more heartbeats of trying to force his thoughts in order. He said it carefully in Chinese, to keep his accent up to standard, and directed it toward the clay pig on the shelf so he felt a little less like he was just talking to himself. It was a reminder to stay the hell out of fights as long as he could, because that was definitely Tomoe and Shinta’s field. 

The pig itself was also one of the many, many schemes Wataru and Shinta had tried to get Tomoe to practice more after the Shanghai tutor stormed out, but staring dramatically out the window was more her thing. 

Speaking of immense time spent doing things, dinner was nigh and the sun was probably setting behind the storm. If nothing else, Wataru needed the tea set back so he could make much of anything to accompany dinner. What dinner there was, anyway; the day’s chaos made it hard to do more than stockpile fried buns and prepare to run at a moment’s notice. 

With this thought in mind, Wataru headed up the stairs with the tray in hand. He knocked at the open door before sticking his head around the gap. 

Tomoe had moved the privacy screen to the other side of the room, but didn’t seem to have done much else. She was still looking out the window, back turned to the rest of the house. With her hair and her dark robes and the way she sat so still, it was a little like looking at an ink blot on a painting—though one with hands still clutching a teacup notably devoid of steam. 

And she’d completely neglected the rest of the tea set, too. Must’ve been one of those days. But more so, given the outside factors. 

Wataru cleared his throat and asked, “Is your brother still not back yet?” 

Tomoe looked back at him and shook her head minutely. 

Wataru set the tray down and Tomoe returned her untouched cup. She scooted backward to give him a little room to peer into the smoky air. If not for Shinta’s absence, the lantern in this room would have been doused as soon as the trouble began.

It’d probably still be smoky in here, though.

“You don’t think he’s out _there_ , do you?” Wataru asked. He closed one of the shutters, but left the other so Tomoe could still keep watch. After a couple heartbeats to think, he backed off, settled at the table, and said, “I’ve closed up the rest of the house, but—”

Tomoe came to life all at once, pouncing and knocking him straight to the floor with a clatter. The back of Wataru’s head avoiding the hitting the mats or wood (and subsequently driving his bun through his skull, probably) solely because she got her hand under his head in time. Her face angled toward the window even though she was pinning him one-handed.

Wataru opened his mouth to either joke or ask what the hell that was for, but remembered himself just in time. Tomoe knew her business. And her business was mostly violent, so he shut his mouth with a click of teeth. 

And a blue-teal-and-purple-robed figure climbed in through the window, soaked to the skin and swearing floridly in a Hubei accent. And then another, and another, and a smaller shape in the back wearing the duller purple-black-white of a Yunmeng Jiang baby disciple. Babyish. Under age twelve, anyway. 

Wataru got to his feet in time for Shinta to be the last one through, and closed the shutter behind him. For the first time literally _ever,_ Wataru was glad there was an absolute nightmare of a ginkgo tree at the back of the house. (Stepping on its smelly fruit _once_ soured him on the entire concept.) Honestly, the storm darkened sky probably did the rest of the camouflage work, especially since none of the cultivators had their swords unsheathed. 

Not exactly the usual window situation, even in _this_ house.

 _“We have spare robes,”_ Shinta said in the only dialect he’d fully adopted. At least the Shanghai tutor earned _half_ his payment. _“And food. You can rest here until—”_

At this point, Tomoe caught the child by the back of his robe before he could smash right into the back of the older cultivator. To Wataru’s inexpert eye, he’d fainted on the spot from exhaustion. 

_“Until he recovers?”_ Shinta finished with a more nervous glance at Tomoe and Wataru in turn, as though abruptly remembering who else was here. His deep red hair was nearly black from the rain and dripped into the deep silence after his question.

Tomoe’s dark gaze slid from Shinta to his four guests, then down to the unconscious child in her arms. She beckoned the tallest cultivator closer, then deposited the child in his arms. Without a word, she shook her sleeves once and headed down the stairs. 

_“What is she—?”_ began the second cultivator, her voice rising in alarm. 

Shinta ran after her. _“Wait—”_

 _“She’s just upset,”_ Wataru said, sidling over to the edge of the room to block the easiest way out. Besides the window—but if they’d come in that way, he figured they had enough sense not to go out and immediately smack into the damn tree. _“Sorry about that, but since her brother brought you here, she’s going to make sure you weren’t followed.”_

 _“Who even are you people?”_ asked the third adult of their group. Wataru really needed to put some names to faces, or else he’d call this guy Rude for the rest of their acquaintance. Weird as it was. 

_“As of right now,”_ Wataru said, leaning over comically left to reach a dresser while not leaving the doorway, _“we’re here to help you.”_ He raised his free hand in a three-fingered salute that worked better for locals than bows did, sometimes. _“I swear.”_

And the dresser was full of dry robes, which were worth their weight in gold at the moment. Given that everyone’s clothes probably weighed five times as much when soaked with rainwater, though, perhaps that wasn’t the best comparison. Making a mental note to write his memoirs with slightly better metaphors, Wataru started passing out robes and pointing each new guest at the privacy screen in the corner of the room in case they’d not noticed on the way in.

The only one who didn’t move was Tall Guy, to avoid jostling the unconscious kid. So, really, two people didn’t move. All three of the adult Jiang cultivators radiated tension like heat from three furnaces, which Wataru decided he couldn’t take personally. There was enough bad energy all around the town for plenty of backwash, and these four were basically homeless now. The smoke coming off Lotus Pier hadn’t looked good and probably wasn’t going to in the next couple of hours. 

Wataru, on the other hand, got the grunt work. If Shinta’s decision got them a bunch of unexpected houseguests who might yet get them all killed, well, then that was just life. Or at least the portion of it Wataru was going to deal with, since he certainly wasn’t going to start stabbing people. 

_“If you don’t like the cut or fit of these robes, there aren’t really other options. You’re all tall enough that you’ll mostly be wearing mine.”_ Wataru kept his voice brisk, businesslike. Cultivators didn’t usually tolerate being ordered around by “mediocre people,” but damn if Wataru wasn’t going to do his best to keep them alive. _“They’re mostly the green ones, though you can dig through storage later if you really want to check. If you see black or purple or gray or whatever, they’ll only fit the boy.”_

 _“We understand,”_ said Tall Guy. _“Thank you.”_

Wataru nodded, then worked his way down his list of priorities with gusto. 

He hauled dinner up the stairs in two trips. He got them strong tea, too, and turned the second bedroom into a sort of disciple dormitory by retrieving as much bedding from storage as they owned. The guests were in slightly less bedraggled states each time he saw them in his Shinta-imposed flurry of activity, which made him work that much harder to see the situation stabilized. 

He also got all of their titles when everyone had more or less collapsed from all the activity. Rude was actually Li Jun, Tall Guy was Hu Jianhong, and the sole female cultivator was apparently Fang Shufen. Alternatively: Second Shixiong, Third Shixiong, and Second Shijie, in that order. The kid sitting up and sipping slowly at herbal soup was Li Kai, but the others all called him “Fifth Shidi” most of the time. Given the dreaded combination of mainland family names being in somewhat short supply and Wataru’s personal lack of experience with cultivation sects, he wasn’t entirely sure if any of them were actually related. 

_“It might be for the best if we all forget we ever met each other,”_ said Hu Jianhong, though he didn’t quite sound certain. Even Wataru’s robes hung off him a bit, probably because he was entirely too damn tall. _“The—with the Jiang sect destroyed, we need to leave as soon as we can to avoid losing what living memory we can still save.”_

 _“There isn’t anywhere safe to run to,”_ protested Li Jun, scowling ferociously. _“Even the townspeople know those Wen bastards already burned Cloud Recesses and conquered the Unclean Realm. Lanling might be safe for now if the Jin sect keeps hiding behind their money, but without—”_ His lower lip wobbled and he tried to drink tea to hide it. Then: _“We can’t possibly be the last four left, can we?”_

Fang Shufen closed her eyes for a moment, then said to Wataru, _“Whether we are or aren’t, these humble cultivators can’t impose for long.”_

Wataru glanced toward Li Kai, who still looked like the world owed him more soup and a good night’s sleep. Even in the smallest set of robes they owned—Shinta’s—the kid was going to trip as soon as he tried walking anywhere. Wataru fixed that image in his head, placing it neatly next to the smoke column that had haunted the city all afternoon. Then he said, _“With utmost respect, Jiang sect cultivators can impose for as long as it takes, to avoid wasting my brother’s decision to save their lives.”_

_“I didn’t know you were related,”_ said Li Jun, blatantly eyeballing him. 

Wataru had to admit that he, Tomoe, and Shinta looked about as different as could be when viewed all together. Tomoe and Shinta were both petite and pretty, while Wataru towered over both of them and could grow a reasonable beard. Tomoe’s hair was as dark as the night sky and Wataru’s leaned a bit brownish, while Shinta’s was nearly the color of dark blood. From the cheekbones to builds to accents, they were a weird little group. 

Wataru opened his mouth solely to tell Li Jun where he could stick his opinion, because he didn’t really owe these people any more detailed explanation. 

But Hu Jianhong got there first, _“A-Jun, this is not the time. These people are risking their lives for us.”_

Shinta and Tomoe were still absent, but he was pretty sure they had the sense to get into trouble they could handle. Wataru could probably keep the house from exploding until then.

 _“But we don’t know a thing about them! They could be smugglers, or thieves, or—”_ Li Jun turned his attention back to Wataru. _“Is Chen Hao even your real name?!”_

 _“A-Jun,”_ said Fang Shufen in a growl. 

Finally, Li Jun shut up. 

Well, this was awkward. Luckily, while Wataru could make it even more uncomfortable, he didn’t— 

Downstairs, a door swung open and closed with a bang to shut out the storm. 

—mostly because he didn’t have the opportunity. 

Wataru didn’t run downstairs, but it was a close thing. Fang Shufen followed as far as the top step, then stopped. 

_“How did it go?”_ Wataru asked, though the first words out of his mouth had definitely almost not been any kind of Chinese. Tomoe’s briefly pinched eyebrows—though admittedly that might’ve been because she was busy wringing out her hair—compelled him to add, _“Aside from the weather.”_

 _“Nobody’s following anymore,”_ Shinta said, subdued. Which was about what Wataru had expected. _“Though we did find some evidence that our friends upstairs aren’t the only survivors.”_

 _“Are you sure?”_ Fang Shufen asked hesitantly. When Wataru turned to look back at her and noticed that Li Jun was also peering over the railing, she went on, _“Are you absolutely sure?”_

 _“Wen Chao ordered his men to start searching for three people all along the river and anywhere else the Wen soldiers patrol,”_ Shinta said. He fished around in his robes until he came up with a slightly damp piece of paper that was definitely more expensive than what Wataru used daily. With a flick of his wrist, the paper sailed across the room to land in Fang Shufen’s hands. _“They’re definitely looking for anyone who wasn’t at Lotus Pier when it was attacked, too, but they have to go house by house and have the sect registries in hand to do that. These are the only ones listed separately.”_

Li Jun had already unfolded it. Then, _“I knew it! I knew someone had to have made it out—”_ His expression dropped almost immediately. _“But if they’re only looking for these three, then Madam Yu and Sect Leader Jiang…”_

 _“Sorry,”_ said Tomoe, into the grief-tinged silence. _“For your loss.”_

That was probably the sentence Tomoe had said in _any_ local dialect in at least two days. 

So, to undercut the moment and keep Tomoe from spending too much time worried about first impressions, Wataru promptly dumped a towel on Shinta’s head. _“Quit dripping on my floors. We’ll talk about all this when you won’t catch a chill and die.”_

As the “master” of the house—insofar as he’d paid for the land, the house, and that cursed tree—Wataru’s word at least held some weight. The cultivators piled back into the room they’d invaded and continued talking about the news. Probably. He wasn’t really sure what else they had to talk about, other than maybe how much it sucked to have to sit on their hands and do nothing while everything was so terrible outside. 

At least the news gave them a little hope.

“I should’ve probably brought them somewhere else,” Shinta said, a while and one outfit change later. After Wataru had hauled up a chair and handed him a comb, combing out the rainwater at least kept him in one spot long enough for Wataru’s nerves to settle. “I panicked.” 

“You panicked two separate times,” Tomoe reminded him, even as she poured tea for all three of them. Turned out that they _did_ have another teapot, even if it was just Tomoe’s personal one. 

“He did?” Wataru asked. 

“None of the cultivators upstairs were present during the attack. They all returned after the distress flares were launched and the barrier collapsed,” Tomoe explained impatiently, “which is the only reason they are alive.” 

Wataru winced. Yeah, fishing people _out_ of that mess would’ve probably been beyond even Tomoe and Shinta’s combined killing expertise. “Were they out visiting relatives?” 

“Two were night-hunting. Apparently, their sect has a high number of patrolling cultivators.” Tomoe finished pouring and distributed the cups. “There is some hope of finding more survivors, if they are not chased down by Wen over the next few weeks.” 

Wataru sat next to Tomoe, leaning a little so she could easily touch him if she so chose. “I assume we can’t just toss them out on their qi-wielding behinds even if we wanted to.” 

“Probably not,” Shinta admitted, but there was no actual _guilt_ in his face or tone. Regret at the risk to Tomoe and Wataru, maybe, but Wataru had never heard him apologize for protecting people and didn’t expect him to suddenly start now. 

The fact was, Wataru wouldn’t even have met them if not for Shinta’s bleeding heart. He couldn’t bring himself to criticize. He liked having his guts on the inside and preferred to stay that way for the foreseeable future. Really, the people upstairs couldn’t have asked for a better advocate under this roof. Shinta had a knack for roping Tomoe into his choices, too. 

“We are involved in their war now,” Tomoe said. In Tomoe’s voice, there was the kind of tension she usually didn’t explain. It flared up the last three times they’d arrived in cities where her targets dwelled, oblivious to their impending deaths. “I suppose it can’t be helped.” 

It was anticipation. 

Wataru tilted his head to one side, a little apprehensive, before he rested a hand against Tomoe’s back. Under his careful touch, the brittleness of her posture eased slightly.

“Well, I guess we have a plan? Maybe?” Shinta offered weakly. Not actually suggesting his own ideas, but he wasn’t as familiar with Wataru’s line of work _or_ cultivators. 

Wataru rolled his eyes. “Just leave it to me. I haven’t just been spending the last four months playing housekeeper.” 

“I look forward to seeing what you’ve come up with,” Tomoe said under her breath.

* * *

“So, what the hell happened?” Wataru asked about three hours later. 

Shinta lifted his head from the bowl of his arms, meeting Wataru’s dark gaze from across the dimly-lit room. With the cultivators sleeping upstairs in an effort to regain their strength, the three actual members of their household were arranged around the main table in the kitchen in an effort not to disturb them. Mostly with rapid-fire Nihongo, at least until the sun was long gone and only the bats were busy. 

“We’re both entirely on your side,” Wataru continued, when Shinta didn’t immediately answer. “You know that, right?” 

“She had a lot to say about…” Shinta tapped the table and the list of safehouses and supplies they’d burn by sunrise. “About rushing into a decision like this.” 

“I’m sure she did,” said Wataru, even though both of them knew that Tomoe tended to weigh her words twice before speaking even once. “But Tomoe-chan’s more active now than she’s been since we got here. None of us like being entirely at loose ends.” 

“Were we, though?” Shinta asked. At Wataru’s questioning pause, he went on, “It’s completely different from where I came from, but I like it here. It was peaceful. And I—I even remember seeing the Jiang sect around town, all the time.” He glanced at the long-dried brush on the table and grimaced. “I couldn’t just stand by and do nothing.” 

Wataru sighed. “That’s noble of you, but what _happened?”_

Shinta took a slow breath and considered how to even start the story. 

Tomoe was the only one of them who had a complete list of all the people who deserved death by her hand. The last handful of Tomoe’s targets had fled the tide of death that pulled from the edge of Tomoe’s sword and sailed away on the true sea. She had no more intention of letting _them_ live than she had the others—especially not when one of the remaining four had seen her face, once, and likely would have recognized her school’s bladework.

Shinta understood, a little, and followed along like a faithful shadow.

Wataru, by contrast, went around entirely unarmed except for his mind and his voice, and pulled money and resources seemingly out of thin air. Or perhaps some other, secret means that Shinta wasn’t allowed to see despite turning twenty last year. 

And they’d all arrived in Yunmeng in the spring, only to realize that the rumor about Asakura Gin was vague at best and dead at worst. For all they knew, he was either in hiding or dead, either from ghosts, bandits, wild boars, or just tripping off a dock and drowning. With other Nihonjin as secretive as their little cluster, they had to rely on Wataru’s…resourcefulness to find out anything. Dead ends, everywhere. 

Four months and several festivals later, and they were still here. 

And it wasn’t at all bad! Shinta spent most of his time circulating among the locals and learning about their world one market hawker or screaming child at a time. Before—before this, he’d— 

Traveling with Tomoe was different than any other journey Shinta remembered. And then his mind shifted immediately to breaking down all the reasons why, which was arguably worse than picturing heads rolling in the street. 

Shinta drew a shuddering breath and tried to force his thoughts back into order. 

“Hey,” said Wataru’s voice, low and concerned, “where’d you just go?” 

Shinta blinked into the dim light offered by the nearby lantern, feeling returning as he clenched his hands. “I—sorry. I just…”

Wataru considered him, then said, “I already know you two get nightmares.” He nudged the teapot, on its third steeping of the evening, across the table. “We’re not getting much sleep tonight, so take all the time you need.” 

Shinta twisted his bangs, since the rest of his hair had already been carefully tied away from his face by his usual sleep braid. “I’ve had to stand to the side too many times, while everything burned down around me. Tomoe was there the first time I-I made a choice that changed everything. And she knew, I think, that I’d do it again.” 

“But not for the people around here?” Wataru suggested. 

“Maybe only in the back of her mind.” He doubted Tomoe knew for _sure_ until he’d climbed in through the window and almost dropped a child on her. 

“Well, nothing like a few deaths to get a samurai’s blood moving again,” Wataru said mildly, and Shinta winced. “Look, I know how Tomoe-chan works. I’m half-expecting to hear the Wen soldiers screaming at sunrise because they found one of their patrols in seventeen pieces.” 

“I was never a samurai.” Shinta swallowed, closing his eyes against—but there hadn’t been blood that he saw, not in the middle of the storm. He’d already been halfway up the next street before Tomoe drew her sword. “And they won’t find anything.”

“Is that because no one died or because she made sure you scattered their bodies on a pig farm?” Wataru asked, voice as dry as Yunmeng wasn’t. 

Shinta hesitated. 

“Don’t actually tell me. I still need to budget for your travel expenses and I don’t need that image in my head.” 

“But you’re the one who brought it up?”

“I bring up a _lot_ of things. You should know better than to always listen by now.” 

Shinta was saved from having to figure out how the rest of this sleep-deprived conversation was going to go by the sound of Tomoe walking down the stairs to join them. She carried an armload of used bandages in a washbasin, and looked less than impressed by the two of them sitting at the table and trying to plan for tomorrow. Her spiritual power was a little depleted, but no fatigue showed on her face despite the late hour. 

Tomoe held up her free hand before either Wataru or Shinta could rise from the table, disappearing out the back door without otherwise acknowledging them.

“So, the story?” Wataru asked again. 

Shinta waited until he’d downed the next dose of tea, then began to explain how he’d gotten them all into this mess. 

It wasn’t a particularly long story if Shinta removed the bloody details. 

Like Wataru, Shinta was vaguely aware of the rising tension among the cultivation sects. And then Wen Ruohan had banned all other sects from night-hunting or dealing with hauntings. Since the purpose and profit of cultivation sects were heavily intertwined, and because Yunmeng Jiang was one of the Five Great Sects, it seemed like _everyone_ was talking about it. In the last couple of weeks, Shinta had overheard stories about Wen Chao slaying some legendary monster, but the details changed by the telling. 

And then the army of Qishan Wen sect descended on Yunmeng Jiang, and here they were. 

Shinta had been in the market when the barrier went up and flaming arrows rained down, and could still see it when the barrier died. Could see half the buildings closest to the clan holdings caught in the blaze. 

Rushing in to save lives had never been the smartest decision, but Shinta didn’t hesitate the first time and hadn’t on any of the subsequent ones.

Shinta was no more equipped to rescue people from homes engulfed in flames than anyone else he could name, but he tried his best. Smoke and ash sank into his clothes and hair as he guided whole families out of danger one household at a time. If not for the pounding rain that managed the worst of the fires, there was every chance Shinta might not have made it back that night. Even so, it was close. Screaming, fleeing people and massive blasts of spiritual energy burned into Shinta’s memory like a brand. It was perhaps for the best Wataru didn’t hear this. Wataru didn’t have any real ability to sense spiritual energy, and thus couldn’t quite understand that dimension to the battle. 

Maybe because of the overwhelming sensation, Shinta had missed the exact moment when the first wave of roaming Jiang cultivators returned. It hadn’t seem to make any difference to the Wen attackers. There were more sword flashes in the night, but they didn’t last. 

All he could do, in the end, wasn’t that much.

“Wait, those four weren’t the first cultivators you saw?” Wataru interrupted. 

“I was in the market, remember? I saw plenty of people run back to the clan compound when the Wen forces arrived, but—” Shinta bit his lip. “I didn’t find Li Jun or any of the others until everything was already over. I was waiting on the roofs for anyone who…missed it.” 

“And thus, here we are now.” Tomoe had returned during the story, and settled at the table to sharpen her tantō with the kitchen whetstone. “You’ll depart tomorrow morning with your handful of lotuses. Wataru will take his own path. And I will do as I must to distract all attention from your self-imposed mission.” She raised the knife, pointing the tip toward Shinta’s face. “Understand?”

Shinta bowed his head. “I know.” 

“Warriors like me only serve one purpose,” Tomoe said. Her words were sharp and short. “I live to see my foes in pieces. Nothing else.” Her spiritual energy was like a haze in the air, crawling like mist around ankles and sending a shiver down both Shinta and Wataru’s spines. “But if you fight to protect what’s important, you cannot afford to lose. Your death will also cost the lives of those behind you.” Her voice was a command, demand, and plea. _“Do not die._ ” 

Shinta deliberately avoided moving his hands. If he wasn’t careful, they’d curl into fists or he’d try to reach across the table to grasp Tomoe’s hands, and both outcomes were almost too sentimental for them. “I _won’t.”_

“Good.” And Tomoe reached out instead, perceptive as ever, and ruffled his hair. 

Then Wataru did, too, and ruined the moment because Shinta _had_ to slap his hand away. The man had never met a tense moment that he didn’t feel the urge to immediately mangle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I might swing back and forth between using Chinese honorifics and their rough English translations during this story, but I'll be sure to provide notes as we go. 
> 
> Also, Japan's mostly referred to as "Nihon" in this story basically because the word "Japan" didn't exist until there were several more rounds of foreigners playing telephone. Thanks, international trade. Chinese characters may refer to it as "Dongying," which literally means "the East" but colloquially it's the archipelago next door that occasionally sends diplomatic missions and/or pirates.


	2. Pathways

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wataru and Shinta = Begin independent plot threads. And in one case, the plot hook trips over the character instead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: The two POV segments in this chapter take place a month and about 300 km apart. Because of the way that half the characters can fly and the existence of teleportation through magic, this distance basically amounts to nothing but trivia.
> 
> Ningbo is a port city that has historically contained foreigner-only districts, including a Jewish community! In what research I could find, the two groups who have gotten entirely kicked out of Ningbo are the Portuguese (for piracy) and the Japanese (a political fustercluck between people serving different clans, but also piracy). This happened during the Ming dynasty, though, so it's, again, trivia.

_“A-Jun,”_ Wataru said, nudging his fellow passenger with his elbow. When Li Jun didn’t immediately respond, Wataru kept nudging like a particularly insistent child. Eventually, he jostled Li Jun entirely upright and said to his groggy traveling companion, _“We’re here.”_

 _“Wha—”_ Around a yawn, Li Jun said, _“Where’s here?”_

 _“Our destination, duh. Get out before the boatman hits you with his oar! Or maybe the cormorant will come back and do it for him. Come on, come on, get moving before I have to imagine the noise that would make!”_ Wataru tapped the side of his head. _“I have a really good imagination and no shame in making your ears suffer.”_

 _“How did the Heavens decide to let you be ten years older than me? You must have stolen that time somehow,”_ Li Jun muttered, but he got up and followed Wataru onto the dock. 

Wataru pretended not to hear him, because most of his best comebacks involved making fun of his cultivator status and they were at least nominally undercover. Besides, Li Jun was going to be a bit of a rope around his ankle until he could get to his meeting, tripping him up the whole way. Maybe even afterward. It’d depend on how well Li Jun pretended to be a lot more even-tempered than he was. 

That was probably a little unfair. 

_“Chen-qianbei,”_ Li Jun said after they’d made their way farther into the city (and nearly been run over by some official’s carriage), _“I don’t see why we need to stop in Ningbo. It might not be crawling with soldiers, but—”_

 _“I’ll stop you right there, a-Jun.”_ Wataru held up a hand. _“Getting out of the way of cultivator drama is the entire point! Look at this city.”_ When Li Jun humored him by looking around in a put-upon teenager sort of way, Wataru went on, _“Everyone else can go scream about ‘sun’ this or ‘lotus’ that, but you can really lose yourself in a place like this. And I just so happen to have friends who can lend us rooms.”_

Li Jun glared at him, probably for the oblique reference to the ongoing cultivator war raging farther inland. _“Chen-qianbei, don’t. Don’t make jokes about things you don’t understand.”_

Wataru was used to it. He waved a hand to dismiss the entire argument, then dragged Li Jun into the city proper. _“Whatever! The important part is that we’re here now, and only half as likely to be stabbed. Follow me.”_

 _“You’re going to get us stuck cleaning floors in a gambling house, aren’t you? Or—or a brothel!”_ Li Jun did _not_ fume, but he did hiss his accusations as though Wataru particularly gave a damn about his complaints. He’d listen if they were serious. These were not. 

_“It’s cute that you can still think I’m that predictable.”_

In fact, Wataru headed directly for the foreign bits of the city with a spring in his step and a surly, weary teenager on his heels. 

Sitting on Hangzhou Bay at the mouth of Qianlong River, Ningbo had to be one of the biggest ports in the whole world, in Wataru’s humble opinion. The air was alive with the sound of chatty seabirds and people from a dozen countries, all at work and entirely too busy to care one bit if a couple of merchants in travel robes wandered in with relatively little luggage and no servants. The air alternately smelled like fish, or salt, or smoke, or like too many people crammed into too small a space. Walking through the wrong alleyway was a very dangerous choice for those who didn’t know how to avoid trouble of a very mortal kind. 

No noble cultivator—and barely any magistrates—would be caught dead here, so far from the spiritually harmonious lifestyles they preferred. Cultivators mostly stuck to places with excellent _feng shui._ This? This was the chaos of human life. 

It felt a bit like a homecoming. 

Wataru’s memories of spending his childhood in Nagasaki were halfway faded now, but he distinctly remembered his first time hearing longshoremen and sailors screaming at each other in whatever trade tongue was their preferred option. He’d never heard such language! Or been able to learn new curses quite so quickly. No matter where he went, loud crowds of people living their lives felt _right_ in a way that little else did. 

Poor Li Jun didn’t look like he agreed. Even putting aside destruction of his sect, the smell of a shantytown took some getting used to. 

_“What in the world do you expect to find here?”_ Li Jun asked at last, once they’d passed through several narrow excuses for side streets. 

_“This!”_ Wataru replied brightly. 

“This” was an inn on the far side of the port, crammed up against the property lines that would have ordinarily told the owner to go whining to an embassy. The name on the banner was garbled nonsense from the perspective of people who only read and wrote in _hanzi,_ but Wataru could read them well enough. Sure, “Ningbo Inn” written in katakana was about the most boring name in the world—certainly the most boring name in the city—but Wataru had forgiven this place for its foibles years ago. 

The master of the inn wasn’t at the front desk. The man who _was_ there, speaking to a servant, looked up to greet his new customers as soon as their shadows darkened the doorway.

He took one look at Wataru and immediately rolled his eyes. 

“I’m back and I’m not dead!” said Wataru as he walked up and the servant scurried away. 

“So I see,” said Yūhi Shinku, who always looked like he had swallowed several umeboshi in one go. The look intensified when faced with Wataru’s cheer barrage, and morphed into something approaching “deeply unimpressed” when he took in both Wataru’s and Li Jun’s full appearances. “What a miracle. Who is your…plus one?” 

“An ongoing concern is what he is,” Wataru replied. His eyes darted toward the stairs. “The boss’s expecting me, isn’t he?” 

“He knew you were headed here the instant you arrived,” was the response. “Go. I’ll entertain your guest.” 

“Just feed him. He’ll probably collapse at the first sign of someplace to take a decent nap.” Wataru suggested, even as servants appeared to fuss over them both. “We’ve been on the road for… I don’t even know. It’s been rough.”

“So I’ve heard.” 

One of these days, the emperor would finally call Yūhi back home, and then who would Wataru harass whenever he returned to Ningbo? Someone who reacted more, probably. Honestly, it’d be a tragedy. 

“Go upstairs. We’ll feed _yet another_ one of your spare younger brothers,” Yūhi said. 

Wataru did not stick his tongue out at the man, deciding that discretion was probably the better part of valor. Instead, he bowed in thanks before scrambling up to the next floor. 

Yūhi hadn’t actually been around when Wataru dragged Shinta and Tomoe through these same streets and stashed them in a room that wasn’t on any of the building’s plans. Wataru figured, then, that if he couldn’t find them after living in and around the place for several years, then no authority figure would either. 

Two servants pointed him to the correct room, which took him through two false hallways that were probably shinobi tricks. Neither of them said a word to him, which was equally likely to be because they were in his role from a decade ago or due to some kind of secret training regime. Either way, he found himself sitting on at a lovely mahogany table with the understanding that he wasn’t going anywhere for a while.

Across the table, the reason for all this circumspection sat with a patient expression on his face. 

“Been a while, hasn’t it?” Wataru considered his options, then reached out to pour tea for them both. 

“A year,” Hatake Sakumo replied with a nod. 

There's no way in hell this guy's name was actually Hatake Sakumo, but no one was brave enough to say that to his face. It was a pretty nice face, too, assuming that there wasn’t some kind of shinobi trick there, too. By contrast, his hair was a wreck of prematurely gray strands that required some serious hair dye, all tied back into an plain, rough tail at the base of his neck.

“I didn’t honestly expect to see you back in the city for several years,” Hatake said, after the tea was sorted out. 

“Oh, ouch. You really thought I couldn’t find my way back?” 

“I thought it would take longer to get into trouble that would _require_ you to,” Hatake corrected him. “But now half of the inner country is killing itself, our supplies are suddenly in use again, and _you’re_ back in the city. What happened?” 

Wataru scratched at entirely-too-many-days’ worth of stubble. “Well…it’s a long story.”

“I have the time to listen.” Hatake took a slow sip of his tea. 

“Ugh, do you always have to be so nice? It’s making me look bad.” 

Hatake Sakumo known Wataru for the better part of a decade and known _of_ him for probably even longer, for all that he'd only recently turned thirty. People trained by shinobi clans tended to start early with high expectations wrapped around their throats, subsuming themselves entirely into the role of spy, assassin, and general skulker. Those who began their career as warriors instead drifted toward a different skillset, or else turned into strange hybrids of both. 

Tomoe was probably the first person Wataru knew who’d stumbled back-asswards into the same career path as the master of this place, without any actual training from an established shinobi clan. And that went double for Shinta, the junior partner in their arrangement.

“To make a very long story short—” 

“Wataru-kun, really?” 

“It’s _really_ long,” Wataru complained. 

“I already know about the angry dojo situation, if that’s where you were planning on starting.” Hatake had such a way with words. Clearly, thousands of angry magic-wielding warriors ranging across the countryside was someone else’s problem.

It was the kind of thing that Hatake and Yūhi could say because they were still allowed to return to Nihon alive. Funny how life worked out. 

“Clan, dojo, and onmyōji rolled into one. Or, I don’t know, hundreds? There are a lot of them and I honesty stopped counting after the first-rate ones, since they’re rich.” Wataru shrugged. “Anyway, Shinta-kun noticed the sect war starting down south and jumped into it by protecting some survivors. I need some of our people to keep an eye out for more.” 

Hatake’s still-dark eyebrows rose with each word. “Do you expect us to intervene, or…?”

“No, no. Just keep an eye out.” Wataru leaned forward. “The kid following me is one of them, too.” 

Hatake looked out the door, calculating risks while his eyes stayed trained upon the inspiring surroundings. The surroundings: four plain walls, a floor, and Wataru. Someone needed to tell him to keep potted plants or something. 

“You’re still absolutely mooning over Tomoe-san, aren’t you.” It was not remotely a question.

Wataru ignored that remark outright and gestured to himself. “I can only cover so much ground! The best I can do is listen. I just need more ears.” 

“Which you need because you don’t want to make Tomoe-san’s brother sad by backing away from his decision,” Hatake said with a sigh. “That at least answers my concerns about your priorities.” 

“Hey—!” 

“They’re the same as ever.” 

“Rude!” 

“Accurate,” Hatake said flatly. 

“Still rude,” Wataru grumbled. 

“You won’t back down from this, will you?” 

Wataru tried not to fidget for a few seconds. He didn’t have the best record, and self-discipline continued to fail him profoundly in any skill related to meditation, tranquility, and all of that spiritual stuff. Then, while his hands twitched against the fabric over his knees, he said, “No.” 

“I didn’t think so,” Hatake said with a sigh. He was too dignified to smack his palm against his face and too sentimental to just tell Wataru to shove off and solve his own problems, which probably said more about the power of familiarity than anything. 

Wataru hadn’t exactly been the greatest friend for the last couple of years. 

“Wataru-kun, I’ll need a favor in return.” 

“Done.” 

Hatake gave him a look that spoke volumes about Wataru’s ability to make sensible decisions, at least in his eyes. “You don’t even know what it is yet.” 

“Doesn’t matter,” Wataru said. He shifted around until he was no longer sitting in seiza, since his legs buzzed like cicadas and it was the worst sensation in the world. “In exchange for getting that Jiang kid where he needs to be, I’ll need to get back to work, won’t I? I slacked off for an entire season there.” 

Hatake nodded. The lines in his face seemed even more pronounced as he turned to contemplate the window, at least in the midafternoon light. 

Wataru waited. 

Finally, Hatake said, “Go to Lanling. As much as I hate to admit it, our information there is thin on the ground, and the Lanling Jin are the only cultivation clan whose strength is the same as it was a year ago. If there’s any serpent’s den worthy of our attention now, that’s it.” 

Well, he’d sort of planned on going there anyway, both to be out of the bulk of the fighting and to maintain his profit margin. From the sounds of things, Jin Guangshan planned to stay well out of the war until everyone else was exhausted, then swoop in at the last second to proclaim a great victory. “Sounds doable.” 

“And Wataru-kun?” 

Wataru, who hadn’t moved to leave or anything, said, “What?” 

“Two things. First, keep an eye out for any cultivation manuals.” Hatake cast his eyes heavenward, as though praying for patience. _“Somehow,_ interest in the secrets of immortality tempts people beyond those currently involved in this war. And second, keep up with the agents you left in Hubei. They didn’t stop working just because you drifted downriver.” 

Wataru grinned. “Well, if Hatake-senpai needs a favor…”

Hatake sighed again. “Please just go. If you keep talking, I’m going to have to explain to someone why there’s blood all over the floor.” 

“I’m going, I’m going. Ugh, why are all my friends so stuffy…” 

Wataru trooped down the stairs after the subsequent disciplinary staredown and lecture combination finished. It wasn’t because of Hatake—instead, the housekeeper nearly bit his head off for tracking dirt inside, which was fair. It wasn’t as though living in this country hadn’t, occasionally, given him reason to run screaming from things that literally wanted to rip the life from his bones. By comparison, even the entire building’s worth of servants wasn’t enough to completely cow him.

But when he arrived in the banquet room again, he found Li Jun asleep at his assigned table. The mess of dishes left after he broke his unwilling travel fast was impressive, but then Wataru revised his estimate of how much 1) teenagers and 2) cultivators could probably put away to power their…powers. 

_“Is he going to be okay?”_ asked one of the other customers. He was wiry, white-whiskered and tougher than teak—truly, the model of an old sailor. Wataru had no idea what country he’d started in, but his Mandarin was better than Wataru’s was.

Also, he was thankfully the only person paying actual attention to them. Hard to tell if that was because there were no other occupants in the dining area, or because he was one of Hatake’s many agents. Could easily be both. 

_“Probably?”_ After a second’s consideration, Wataru decided to check by saying rapidly, _“A-Jun, are you dead or just dead tired? I’m told there’s a difference in the cultivation business. Usually. Aren’t you supposed to hunt ghosts at night? How are you going to—”_

 _“Stop. Talking,”_ Li Jun groaned, drawing a hand over his face in an effort to block out the light and also Wataru’s voice. The joke was on him; the hat and the hand would only block light, not sound. 

_“Wakey wakey, A-Jun. You’re not allowed to sleep under tables unless you’re at least as cute as a street dog. Which you’re not.”_ Wataru kept poking him. _“Come on, I got us a room that’s not open to the street.”_

 _“Why are you the absolute worst,”_ Li Jun said with a scowl, but it wasn’t a question and Wataru didn’t much care to answer it if it was. 

_“Up, up.”_

Wataru manhandled Li Jun up the stairs and into the assigned room, though Li Jun could’ve definitely broken free with barely any effort on his part. The lack of follow-through on the grumbling got him eventually bundled onto one of the beds and under a decent set of blankets, while Wataru puttered around making sure everything was in order. 

_“Chen-qianbei?”_ Li Jun asked after a while, sounding fuzzy with post-meal drowsiness. Probably with no assistance from wine, too. 

_“I’m sure you have a lot of questions.”_ In his position, Wataru would. He just probably wouldn’t ask most of them. And probably get punched in the face at least once. 

_“Yeah, starting with ‘who the hell even are you’ and ‘what is your deal,’ but I think Second Shijie would yell at me for being rude to someone who’s helping us.”_ Li Jun rolled over and let out a slow, unhappy breath as he watched Wataru fiddle with the incense burner on the table. _“Even if she found out afterward.”_

_“I mean, you can do what I do.”_

Li Jun scrunched his face up. _“Which is?”_

_“Blame everything on circumstances and move on before you have to think about it too hard.”_

_“That is the worst solution I’ve ever heard. How are you an adult?”_

Wataru shrugged one shoulder. He lit the incense—jasmine, maybe—and sat at the room’s only table. _“Luckily, you won’t need to deal with me for too long. Lanling awaits!”_

Under Li Jun’s glare, Wataru explained the only bits of his “plan” that were relevant to Li Jun’s immediate future. With any luck, Hatake’s flunkies would have a location for Li Jun to chase down tomorrow morning, and everyone could get this war moving properly. Four great sects versus the one that started the conflict.

With some pretty severe caveats, sure. 

_“The hell it does.”_ He threw an arm across his face. After a few tense moments, his voice emerged much rougher, and more exhausted than before. _“Our first disciple would be so much better for this than me. He actually_ likes _talking to people. He’d just go out, and do something amazing, and this would just be better. Him and…and Jiang-zongzhu, now. Neither of them would just run out of power now and need to be coddled.”_

 _“A-Jun…”_ Wataru grimaced. The river route got them to large cities faster, but they weren’t exactly keeping up with the news from the world of would-be immortals as well as, say, people who could fly on swords. They hadn’t run into a single Jiang cultivator so far. 

_“I just miss everyone.”_

Well, that definitely wasn’t going to change anytime soon. Wataru refrained from saying so, because that was what a gigantic jerk would do, and he liked to think he was above kicking someone while they were down. 

_“Just sleep, A-Jun.”_

Maybe the time spent getting to know the kid was worth a bit of extra luck or something, because Li Jun fell asleep before Wataru had to resort to drastic measures. Like singing or something.

Hopefully wherever Shinta and Tomoe were, things were going a little more according to plan.

* * *

Weeks passed.

Wataru left first out of all of them, leaving Shinta with a list of safehouses, waystations, and caches that were scattered across all of Hubei and trailed vaguely back to Jiangnan, home of the slightly-less-gutted Gusu Lan sect. Li Jun went with him, dressed in a slightly different tone of green and with his sword stashed safely in a qiankun pouch. While Wataru’s travel plans made little time for finding other Jiang sect survivors, Li Jun seemed to believe that splitting their group into three would increase their chances anyway. 

Li Jun would’ve been disappointed to know that Tomoe left without taking a single cultivator along. She just straightened Shinta’s hair for him, snatched up her prepared qiankun bag, and disappeared into the morning mist without any further comment. 

That left Shinta and his group of three cultivators. Of them, only Hu Jianhong and Fang Shufen could fly for long enough to cross useful distances. Li Kai had apparently ridden along with Fang Shufen on their fateful journey, being too young to manage the trip on his own. They easily swallowed the story of Shinta and Tomoe being a pair of rogue cultivators—Wu Tao and Wu Xue—and made assumptions about Shinta’s (lack of) education in cultivation matters. Such as using swords for anything other than weapons.

(It was easier than explaining how, during their first few days in the country, Shinta had seen humans flying on swords overhead, blanched, and immediately asked Tomoe if there was something suspicious in the buns they’d eaten that day. She’d been surprised, too, but better at hiding her reaction.)

Yunmeng Jiang’s cultivators were familiar with more backroads through their territory than Shinta could hope to remember. If they couldn’t fly due to Wen presence and the river was too dangerous because of the same, then the only option left was the overland route. 

And while making their way through the wilderness at a pace generally described as “tortoise-like,” the four of them talked. 

It started simply enough. 

With no one else to rely upon directly for the first few days, the three adults of their group _needed_ to march to something like the same beat. It was one thing to know that Tomoe caused chaos in the Wen back lines and spent time drawing as much attention as one warrior could. But the cultivators, after the traumatic loss of nearly their entire sect, needed reassurance. Shinta didn’t know how to provide any without talking. He certainly didn’t know them well enough for anything else. 

_“Wu-gongzi—”_ Hu Jianhong began, on their fourth night attempting to rest on the road like non-cultivators. They’d zigzagged across Hubei in fits and starts, keeping barely ahead of Wen forces on some days, but were approaching the border.

 _“Please don’t call me that,”_ Shinta told them, a little frantically. _“I’m really no one special.”_

It didn’t really matter which language he heard; Shinta had never wanted to be honored higher than anyone else. Even Tomoe’s family’s servants made his skin crawl if they ever called him “Asakura-sama,” and not just because he was never really a member of the Asakura clan. He knew, fundamentally, that nearly every person involved with the big sect families outranked him. They wouldn’t give him a second glance if not for the desperate straits they were all in now.

And Shinta didn’t want gratitude from them, not when he’d stood to the side as their sect family died. 

_“Wu-xiong, then,”_ said Hu Jianhong, which was arguably worse. It didn’t imply a different social rank, but—but Shinta would have to live with it, wouldn’t he? If he protested too much, then they’d start asking questions he didn’t want to have to answer. _“When we reach the next village, do you mind doing most of the talking?”_

 _“I don’t mind,”_ said Shinta, _“though…why?”_

 _“Because the Wen may be past the point of searching for Suzhou accents,”_ Fang Shufen put in, not looking any happier about the idea.

Shinta grimaced, remembering the stories about the burning of Cloud Recesses, but stuck to his agreement. Besides, he wasn’t from a thousand _li_ of the Lan sect’s territory. The Shanghai-adjacent words just fit better in his mouth, which made it the easiest dialect to learn and mimic. Properly pronouncing Mandarin was harder, but if people thought just made assumptions about where he came from, he definitely wasn’t going to correct them if it made them look closer at his slip-ups.

 _“As long as one of you can help me read if I have to?”_ Shinta suggested hesitantly.

 _“You can’t read?”_ Li Kai asked, surprised.

 _“Not well,”_ Shinta admitted. _“Sorry.”_

 _“Well, it’s nice to know we can contribute something,”_ Fang Shufen said, seeming on firmer ground. She reached over and brushed some campfire ash off his shoulder. _“The Heavens may not have given you schooling, but they seem happy to put you in the right place for us.”_

Shinta wasn’t sure how to take that, but decided to smile and nod along anyway. 

And the very next day, a Jiang sect cultivator—still wearing the iconic purple—descended on them with a loud, _“Shixiong! Shijie! And isn’t that Fifth Shidi?!”_

 _“Fourth Shimei!”_ was the cry, taken up by the two older cultivators. 

Shinta hadn’t actually figured out how old everyone was, but figured the order was basically a logic puzzle at this point. He was past the point where asking would be anything but awkward. Luckily for all of them, the reunion happened at one of Wataru’s safehouses, where there was nothing more threatening than a boar for at least the width of a mountain. He hadn’t even seen a walking corpse on this journey yet. 

The Jiang cultivators’ reunion wasn’t loud after that, because it turned out that Fourth Shimei (or Third Shimu or Hu Yating) was not alone. In her wake were a small gaggle of slightly younger cultivators, all juniors by some measure Shinta was almost afraid to learn. Apparently, they’d all been on a supervised night hunt deep in the wilderness when the Wen attacked. 

The five juniors mobbed Li Kai anyway, and then all of them started crying. 

_“I thought we were the only ones left,”_ said Hu Yating, enveloped in Hu Jianhong’s tremendous hug. This gave her a vantage point over everyone else when she hooked her chin over his shoulder. 

_“Never been happier to be wrong, for once in your life?”_ suggested Fang Shufen. 

_“Exactly!”_

And over the next week, Jiang cultivators continued to appear. Unlike the first to trip over their group, they often appeared alone and in disguise. Cloaks, veiled hats, and even the choice to wear their sect colors only on inner layers made for a somewhat patchwork group. Shinta would take that over the possibility that they could be tracked and attacked for being too obviously Jiang. 

Most of them even thanked Shinta for his attempts to help, saying how grateful they were despite his being a rogue with no ties to the major sects and very low cultivation. As though it was a coincidence that they hadn’t run into a single Wen patrol since traveling out of Yunmeng. Even as their group's numbers slowly swelled to fifteen, and then continued collecting more members in a trickle, the enemy didn’t seem any closer. 

Shinta kept his mouth shut when they talked about it within earshot. Their streak of good luck wasn't _entirely_ Tomoe’s doing. 

The skin-crawling feeling didn’t leave. It might’ve gotten worse. 

On the day they reached Gusu Lan territory, one of the juniors accompanied Shinta into town for rumor-hunting and shopping duty. With any luck, they’d make the money left in the qiankun bags stretch to buy food and secondhand robes, too. While one or more of the senior cultivators could have come on the same trip, they were more likely to be recognized than a junior in laborer’s hanfu and his “friend” who did all the talking. 

Shinta’s roots were starting to show, too, so he had to borrow a hat from Hu Jianhong to completely dodge suspicion until he could dye his hair again. 

_“It doesn’t look too bad, Wu-xiong,”_ said Li Kai. _“I wouldn’t think you were from anywhere but Jiangnan farmland.”_

The other five juniors seemed much more on-board with the idea of using fake names for the length of the journey. Unfortunately, Shinta had met Li Kai before he’d thought out his cover story.

This particular boy _was,_ however, one of only two people shorter than Shinta was in their entire group. It was easier to hide children or ill-fed peasants in most towns than a man who had to hunch to get through doorways, like Hu Jianhong. Wu and Li were also some of the most common family names anywhere, which made it easier still to blend in. 

_“Glad to hear it, Li-xiong.”_ Shinta didn’t know if he had high hopes for today or if his expectations had just been lowered, but he decided to try for optimism regardless. _“I only need it to work for a couple of hours.”_

In truth, Shinta nearly backed out of the entire idea as they walked down the town’s main street and past hawkers of various wares. 

The town contained at least fifteen cultivators.

While juniors didn’t have the strongest grasp of their spiritual energy, Shinta could pick any of his charges out of a crowd at fifty paces solely because they had “golden cores.” Shinta hadn’t wanted to ask what those were and risk giving away his ignorance, so he just listened to the cultivators as they talked around the “what.” It gave him a decent understanding of the “why.” 

Any golden cores—any _beacons_ of spiritual power—belonged to cultivators. The Wen sect employed more than any other faction could put in the field at the moment, primarily as commanders. Furthermore, cultivation in general made each sect give off a slightly different light in Shinta’s mind. Having no core of his own, not even Shinta’s own spiritual energy interfered with his ability to pick out everyone else from the backdrop of the mundane world. 

Ten of the cores belonged to Wen soldiers—an entire unit—but several did not. Wen patrolled in groups more often now, perhaps because Tomoe was making a point of making lone soldiers disappear, which gave Shinta and Li Kai a chance to get across town without being stopped and interrogated. 

The Wen couldn’t stop people they never saw. 

_“Wu-xiong?”_ Li Kai asked, following closely at Shinta’s elbow as he made his way toward the out-of-place spiritual energy. 

_“Keep up,”_ Shinta said, pitching his voice like an annoyed teenage bully. _“You’re going to make us late.”_

Li Kai picked up on the thread Shinta laid down, at least. _“No, I won’t! You can’t blame this on me, Wu-xiong!”_

Shinta turned a sharp left and led them onward. He kept going, forcing Li Kai to nearly run to keep pace as they ducked between buildings and through back alleys, always keeping the Wen well outside of shouting distance as they closed in on whoever felt like they lived and breathed Jiang-taught cultivation. 

In the end, they arrived at an inn that looked like it had seen better days a very long time ago. The proprietor, from what Shinta could tell, hadn’t repaired the front stoop for long enough that the structure sagged, and the tiles on the roof were cracked. Nevertheless, Shinta and Li Kai made their way to the back of the building and made their way up the wall until they found a cracked shutter, then they let themselves in. 

_“Isn’t this burglary?”_ Li Kai asked. 

_“I wasn’t planning on taking anything. Were you?”_

_“Wu-xiong, that’s still—”_

Not waiting for a complete answer, Shinta came to the room at the end of the hall and knocked, twice. 

The three cultivators inside froze like mice in front of a cat, and he hadn’t even opened the door yet. Shinta counted in his head until the buildup of spiritual power became almost unbearable, then kept waiting. Either this was a bad idea and he was going to face the prospect of being stabbed, or it wasn’t and he wouldn’t.

Two Lans and a Jiang. Different from any other group they’d managed to find so far, but it was a hopeful sign. 

_“Wu-xiong?”_ Li Kai prompted.

The door slid open silently, and then both Shinta and Li Kai were dragged inside the room at swordpoint. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A disorganized glossary of terms:  
> Chinese--  
> Cultivation = a soft magic system focusing on the "cultivation" of golden cores, which are basically spiritual organs that can serve as a source of immortality. Practitioners are called "cultivators" and can do basically everything you've ever seen in a wuxia movie.  
> Sect = a school for learning cultivation, usually run by a clan established centuries prior. In this setting, at least.  
> [Specific sect primer](https://filmdaily.co/news/cultivation-sects-in-the-untamed/).  
> 哥 Ge: Older brother  
> 弟 Di: Younger brother  
> 姐 Jie: Older sister  
> 妹 Mei: Younger sister  
> With the exception of Ge (which is subbed out for "xiong"), sticking "shi" in as a prefix makes it so the characters refer to other members of their sect as martial siblings. When used as a suffix, the "xiong" indicates bro-ness, and actually translating it is almost as awkward as it sounds.  
> The "a-" prefix denotes affection. It's a little performative here, but Wataru has the type of teasing personality that gives him a little leeway before getting punched.  
> Shinta refers to Tomoe as "Jiejie" in earshot of characters who primarily speak Chinese, but the attempt to keep others from noticing his foreign-ness mostly isn't working.  
> "Qianbei" literally means "senior," roughly equivalent to "senpai." A respected person within the same field who's been in it longer than the speaker. It's not used entirely accurately in-text, because hey, manhunt. 
> 
> Japanese--  
> If you came here from _Naruto, _you've already got the honorifics sorted.__


	3. Godspeed

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jiang Cheng: Scramble for any advantage you can during the worst month of your entire life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And here we meet our first canonical character from _The Untamed/Mo Dao Zu Shi_ : Jiang Cheng, courtesy name Jiang Wanyin, also known variously by the fandom as "Grape Uncle," "Purple Pikachu," and "Jiujiu."

Around Jiang Cheng’s finger, Zidian threw faint purple sparks that fizzled into the floor. His hand ached for Sandu, still hidden in some Qishan storage room since the Indoctrination and likely forgotten since then. Even with two Lan disciples flanking him like a pair of fluttery clouds, his heart hammered against his ribs. The worst of the dread churning in his stomach, curled up against his ribcage and writhing, made the untransformed Zidian hiss still louder. 

Jiang Cheng flicked his hand as a signal. 

The two Lans swept the door aside and snatched both interlopers from the hall, silent as death. 

The first figure to land at Jiang Cheng’s feet was unfamiliar—small and slight, not more than a boy—but even someone as seemingly useless as Wang Lingjiao could sell them out to Wen soldiers. For that reason, he let the first Lan disciple pin the newcomer to the floor without any response more considered than a jerk of his head. 

The second—

Jiang Cheng’s broken heart thudded painfully in his chest. 

“Li Kai?” 

“Shixiong—” Li Kai, Fifth Shidi of Yunmeng Jiang’s generation _after_ Jiang Cheng, stared up at him from the floor with an expression like Jiang Cheng had descended from the heavens themselves. He’d stopped struggling against his Lan captor, eyes bright, and managed to say, “Zongzhu. We finally—we didn’t know where you _were.”_

“Hurry up and get off him,” Jiang Cheng snapped at the two Lans. As soon as they obeyed, he dragged Li Kai upright. Both of his hands rested on the younger boy’s shoulders as he demanded, “What do you mean, ‘we’? Did anyone else—?”

Li Kai burst into tears and clung to Jiang Cheng’s plain robes like his life depended on it. 

Trying his best not to flinch, Jiang Cheng waved the Lan disciples away despite his brief flash of frustration and fear. He was never the one the shidis cried to when they inevitably hurt themselves training. Wei Wuxian and their sister, Jiang Yanli, were so much more approachable, whether because they actually liked people or because they could soothe anything short of a restless corpse. 

Without either of them, there was only Jiang Cheng. Prickly, prideful, unhappy Jiang Cheng, who’d seen his parent’s bodies hung from the main gate like lanterns on display and watched his home painted red and gray in a fiery massacre. Who hadn’t seen his remaining family long enough that the worst, pettiest part of him wondered spitefully if he’d lost them forever for daring to allow them out of his sight.

Jiang Cheng surprised even himself by letting his once-missing shidi sob into his only set of spare robes, and again when he rubbed slow circles on the boy’s back with his left hand. He was awkward and ill-prepared for even something this simple, amid the backdrop of all of his other failings. By now, that feeling was horribly familiar. 

Li Kai lurched up after a while, scrubbing futilely at his snotty face with his sleeves. 

Jiang Cheng let the younger boy take his handkerchief and kept trying to comfort him. Before—before, Jiang Cheng hadn’t been sect leader. He’d had entire ranks of disciples and his family between him and needing to act like this. Feeling the fine tremble running through Li Kai, now, wasn’t a sensation he knew from this side. 

“Wu-xiong helped us,” Li Kai whispered, once he’d calmed down for the most part. His eyes were still damp and red, and his voice cracked on the last word, but it was better than outright crying. 

Jiang Cheng turned his attention toward the other boy who’d been dragged in. No longer pinned to the floor, he still stayed in a deep, sincere bow until Jiang Cheng snapped, “Well, get up. Who the hell are you?” 

“Wu Tao,” was the soft reply as the stranger rose. “Just a rogue cultivator.” 

Even at a second glance, Jiang Cheng wasn’t impressed. Fair and slight and small, Jiang Cheng estimated Wu Tao’s age at somewhere around thirteen. With his hat in his lap, Wu Tao’s unevenly dark hair betrayed a hint of deep blood red near the roots, and pale purple-gray eyes set in a fine-boned face. He didn’t _look_ like someone capable of keeping Yunmeng Jiang disciples alive through so much as a summer squall. While inside of a house.

“There are twenty-five of us,” Li Kai said, drawing Jiang Cheng’s attention back to him. “We’ve been finding more disciples who were on night hunts, or training, or in Meishan, but—” He bit his lip against what looked like incoming tears. 

Twenty-five. _Twenty-five_ living disciples, out of more than a thousand before the Wen attacked. Twenty-five was—it was an unimaginable blessing, after nearly a month of thinking that Yunmeng Jiang would have to rebuild from three, and then _two,_ but— 

Jiang Cheng’s hand formed a fist without his permission. Zidian hissed to life again, for half a heartbeat. 

“Zongzhu, you’re alone here?” Li Kai asked, hesitant. 

Jiang Cheng shook his head, both to clear it and as a denial. Despite the knot in his throat, he said, “Not anymore.”

Jiang Cheng had been. Wei Wuxian was missing, gone without a trace ever since he failed to show up in Yiling. Jiang Yangli was making her way slowly through the countryside, hidden by the movements of her Jin clan escorts, and was probably over the border to Qinghe by now. Jiang Cheng—he was here, in Gusu Lan’s territory, solely because he’d run out of other places to run without dragging someone down with him. 

“Jiang-zongzhu,” Wu Tao’s voice said, in an odd, flat corruption of the Gusu accent. Jiang Cheng glared at him for interrupting, but the boy just stared placidly back despite the threat. “Would it be better if this humble one brought your disciples here, or you to them?” 

Jiang Cheng gritted his teeth in an effort to keep the first response from escaping. Every bone in his body screamed at him to say, _"here, bring them here,"_ but the town was as likely to be invaded by Wens as anywhere except maybe Lanling. 

While the rumors swirling around them said the Gusu Lan sect had been fully subjugated, they’d lost roughly half of their disciples in the attack on the Cloud Recesses. While a devastating blow to any clan, their losses were nothing compared to those suffered by the _three_ Yunmeng Jiang survivors Jiang Cheng had known about until this meeting. Gusu Lan cultivators could, in theory, wander where they chose as long as no one raised sword or instrument against the Wen sect. They were beaten. Their presence was mostly viewed as irrelevant, outside of people like Lan Wangji and Lan Xichen. 

Those of the Yunmeng Jiang sect were being _hunted_ _,_ with the sole goal of eradication. 

“I’ll go to them,” Jiang Cheng said finally, getting to his feet again and pulling Li Kai up with him. “It’s easier to hide three people than bring twenty into a town like this.” 

Wu Tao bowed from the floor, then slipped his hat back over his two-toned hair and stood. “The proprietor didn’t see us come in. Is that going to be a problem?” 

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. “The proprietor has a vested interest in seeing Gusu Lan money come his way again. Let the Lans go first.” He pulled his hooded cloak over his shoulders, briefly eyeing Wu Tao and Li Kai. “You didn’t draw any attention from the Wen patrols on your way here, did you?” 

“We haven’t seen any Wens face-to-face since leaving home,” Li Kai reported, then paused as though the thought had only just occurred to him. He tugged on Wu Tao’s patchy sleeve to get the older boy’s attention. “Wu-xiong, isn’t that weird?” 

“Jiejie promised she’d give them something to worry about instead.” Wu Tao tilted his head to one side and closed his eyes, as though listening to a sound not even the musical Lans could hear. “There’s only one patrol in town at the moment. Ten soldiers. Two cultivators who aren’t Wen, Lan, or Jiang. Other than that, there’s just us. We should be able to get past them easily.” 

Jiang Cheng resisted the urge to grab Wu Tao’s collar and shake answers out of him, primarily to questions that started with “How?!” 

He thought about it very intensely to keep himself from doing it, which must have showed on his face. At least, Li Kai hovered at his shoulder and Wu Tao stayed carefully out of reach. The Lans bracketing them as they left the inn didn’t appear to notice one way or another. Having such easily-recognizable members of a defeated sect set Jiang Cheng’s teeth grinding more from anxiety than frustration, and not just because they were Lans. 

Li Kai kept close to Jiang Cheng’s side as they escaped the now-useless hideaway. The Lans broke off to avoid drawing more suspicion than their mismatched group had already earned, but left Jiang Cheng with a Lan sect signal flare in case of trouble. 

“Do not hesitate,” said Lan…something. Jiang Cheng needed a better memory for the Lan cultivators who’d been helping him stay hidden within their territory, but they rotated out often to avoid being missed. 

Jiang Cheng looked at the bamboo tube in his hand and bowed in gratitude, though he couldn’t imagine a scenario where he managed to get the signal off and survived long enough afterward to see reinforcements. If Li Kai and his mysterious new friend were leading him into a trap, he’d be dead before the first blue spark split the air. 

The three of them blended into the crowd as they left the Lans behind, though Jiang Cheng couldn’t be sure how well. Every nerve in his body felt like Zidian’s coils were active, potentially giving them away. 

Wu Tao led them out of the town’s front gate, ahead by a couple of paces as Li Kai clung to Jiang Cheng’s sleeve, which put him well in range of Zidian’s bite if Jiang Cheng decided to attack. He wasn’t entirely sure if the rogue cultivator had the slightest idea what danger he was in. Surely someone who had made it across the country in the company of Jiang sect survivors was capable of assessing risks?

He had to know Jiang Cheng was well past the point where he’d hesitate to kill if it meant defending his people.

“Wu-xiong,” Li Kai said, once they were past the town’s walls and well into the fields, “how did you know where the Wen patrols were? Especially once we were in the crowds.”

Jiang Cheng bit the inside of his cheek to avoid demanding the answers he’d been thinking about for the last ten minutes.

Wu Tao looked back over his shoulder. “They stand out like the sun and moon in the sky. Noticing was easy after Jiejie showed me the basics.” 

Li Kai squinted at him. “Wait, so you can tell cultivators apart by how much power they have?” 

“And their cultivation style.” Wu Tao’s voice was still soft. His eyes closed for a few heartbeats. “No two clans feel the same, and no two people _in_ the same clan feel the same either.” 

“So it’s like…” Li Kai paused, frowning. “Wait, that’s how you found us in Yunmeng. You were looking for Jiang sect cultivators who weren’t…” He swallowed. 

Wu Tao grimaced and turned his head away. “It…helped. I just wish I’d been able to do more.”

“So do I.” 

Jiang Cheng drew a careful breath to avoid spooking Li Kai. While being able to sense spiritual energy wasn’t a unique skill—if it was, cultivators wouldn’t exist at all—being able to identify even incognito cultivators without seeing them was _very_ useful right now. He didn’t know how far Wu Tao’s senses stretched, but anything that could pick out Wen soldiers early was perfect for stealth and for ambushes. The Jiang sect, as it was now, wouldn’t have the strength to face the Wen in open battle for years. 

Not that it ever had, as the attack had so swiftly demonstrated. 

Jiang Cheng rubbed at Zidian’s ring form on his finger, frowning. “You talk like you’re not a cultivator, Wu Tao.” 

“Well, not a _good_ one.” 

That wasn’t an answer. The urge to throttle Wu Tao returned with a vengeance. 

Jiang Cheng did _not_ forget about it when he laid eyes on a small gathering of familiar faces, but the temptation was shoved firmly to the background at around the time five more junior disciples gathered around him like eager puppies. Two of them clung to his arms and the other three to his robes, even though he hadn’t worn Jiang sect purple in weeks and weeks. Hadn’t even seen it since coming down from Baoshan Sanren’s mountain and futilely scouring Yiling for Wei Wuxian.

“Jiang-zongzhu! Jiang-zongzhu!” 

He was _not_ going to cry. Jiang Cheng might’ve gotten a little flustered with Li Kai, but he was over it now. 

He didn’t see any purple—almost all of them wore shades of browns, blues, and even an enterprising pale yellow that could only have been bought third-hand from somewhere in Lanling. Some wore hats or cloaks, or wore makeup, or were smudged with dirt. The Jiang sect disciples had managed to keep themselves alive by using every method at their disposal, and Jiang Cheng’s aching heart eased a little. Hopefully, others would arrive in time.

“Baby disciples,” said Hu Yating, a cultivator who’d served Jiang Fengmian for at least five years as a senior, “get down before Jiang-zongzhu needs his hands again.” 

Hearing that word hurt no less than before. Less than a month ago, the only person who rated that name was his father. And now Jiang Cheng wore his mother’s ring and his father’s title like secondhand robes.

“It’s—” Jiang Cheng cleared his throat. “It’s fine. They’re young.” 

Hu Yating raised one eyebrow and said, “Of course, Jiang-zongzhu. My mistake.” 

As Jiang Cheng looked around, all of the adult cultivators besides Hu Yating bowed to acknowledge his order, which—they might have done that _sometimes_ when he was just the sect heir, but this was something else entirely. At the same time, Jiang Cheng couldn’t unbend himself enough to ask them not to, especially because he _was_ their leader now. All of them were at least five years older than he was, and here they all were. Looking to him for answers.

The only answer Jiang Cheng pictured was revenge. 

“Wu-qianbei, Wu-qianbei,” said Li Chun, one of the other juniors. She was thirteen, and cousin to Li Kai and Li Jun (who was also alive, according to Hu Jianhong). It was still strange to see her in murky green instead of the juniors’ uniform, even if it was much safer.

“Li-guniang,” Wu Tao responded, a little uncertain. He leaned over a little to address her, arms raised as he bowed in greeting. “Did something happen?” 

“I think I saw—” Li Chun began.

And that was as far as she got. 

The shy expression fell off Wu Tao’s face instantly as he jerked his head to the side. 

Between one heartbeat and the next, his left hand shot out directly in front of Li Chun’s face. When he came to a stop, there was an arrowhead protruding from his closed fist, on the correct angle to have struck Li Chun in the throat. Blood dripped from his fingers.

“Ambush!” shouted Hu Yating, and the next moments were chaos. 

Jiang Cheng surged to the front, Zidian unleashed to its full length and trailing a comet’s tail of purple sparks. Two more arrows caught on the body of the whip and burst into flames and ash on contact, sending half-molten excuses for arrowheads scattering across the forest floor. 

Damn the Wens! Jiang Cheng would _not_ lose anyone else while he could still fight. 

The juniors had swords, but Hu Yating and Hu Jianhong herded them into the thicker trees with their own swords blazing with purple light. Fang Shufen took up her place at Jiang Cheng’s side, swearing furiously under her breath as she met the first charging Wen soldier with her entire strength. There were more where he came from. 

In the midst of this chaos, Wu Tao disappeared. 

Jiang Cheng cursed him and his rogue cultivator talent for avoiding trouble, because what else could have caused this? He didn’t know what Wu Tao’s strange cultivation let him do, but _his own words_ painted this as a situation he wouldn’t be in.

Any second, they’d be overrun. There would be a Wen flare in the sky and all the hopes Jiang Cheng had used to get this far would turn to ash in his hands, no matter how hard he fought. They couldn’t afford to die, but neither could they survive a true Wen attack if they were pinned here. 

Hu Yating hadn’t come back yet. With any luck, the juniors might still escape, but Jiang Cheng was so tired of pinning his hope on chances. 

Zidian snapped out, catching a Wen soldier around his throat before he could shout a warning. The man collapsed with a gurgle and twitched frantically as the whip’s power struck his heart like poison. The air smelled like burning hair. 

The next several Wens to charge into the clearing died just as quickly.

So _what_ if Jiang Cheng hadn’t seen Sandu in a month? 

His mother’s last gift—her wrath, her spiritual weapon—would keep the remains of her sect alive, and damn the circumstances. Jiang Cheng would fight until his core burned out of his body—again—to never see another Lotus Pier massacre.

Hu Jianhong flung his sword like a spear and caught a man’s wrist, nailing his arm to a tree. The howl of a Wen in agony was exactly what Jiang Cheng wanted to hear. 

While fighting for his life and those of his fellow Jiang sect survivors, Jiang Cheng didn’t entirely realize when the Wen forces stopped attacking with the same force they had just a minute before. One moment, there were thirty Wens in the trees harassing fifteen Jiangs in close combat, and then there were not. 

It took him longer to hear the screaming through the rush of blood in his ears. 

“That’s not us, is it?” said Fang Shufen, during a lull long enough that she could clean her sword on a Wen corpse. 

“Wrong direction,” said Hu Jianhong, because he’d gotten blood in his eyes from his last opponent. He was the only one who’d dare shut his eyes in the middle of a fight, and only because he was surrounded by people he trusted with his life. 

Fang Shufen handed him her handkerchief.

“Then we’re going to make sure they can’t call for any _more_ help.” Jiang Cheng, with Zidian still transformed, grit his teeth and set off in the direction of the noise. Fang Shufen and two other disciples followed him. If there were no more attackers for now, Jiang Cheng needed to make sure it wasn’t just a stroke of luck.

He needed them all _dead._

Not far from the tangle of trees and bamboo that had hid at least one Wen cultivator behind every bush, there was a dip in the forest, held together by tree roots. Almost the first thing Jiang Cheng noticed was the coppery stench of blood, even more intense than the reek of the short-lived battlefield they’d just left. 

The next clue they had was a Wen cultivator dangling from tree branches thirty paces from where they’d started fighting, an expression of shock still visible on his bloodied face. The only thing keeping his head attached was a scrap of skin and sinew. The quiver attached to his hip had disgorged its contents all over the ground, and Jiang Cheng’s toe snapped the end off his ruined bow when he stepped on it. 

Some distance away, there was a noise that combined all the worst aspects of a New Year’s firework and mud sucking at a person’s feet before silence descended again. Just visible through the trees, flashes of Wen red were like fish in murky water.

Fang Shufen covered her mouth and nose with one sleeve. One of the disciples behind her started to look ill. 

Jiang Cheng didn’t. 

The sound of clashing steel got closer as they made their way through the forest, chasing down the noise. They turned a corner with all their weapons drawn, not entirely sure what to expect. 

The clearing was carpeted with bodies. Wen soldiers lay strewn across the bamboo leaves and dirt, with throats cut or stomachs pierced or faces destroyed. A few of the bodies were in two or more pieces, mostly in the form of several severed arms, and there was a man whose head had clearly been impaled through his officer’s helmet. 

The worst thing was the smell of burning meat and smoke, stronger now after the failed signal flare. Luckily, the foliage, smoke, and the angle of the hill kept Jiang Cheng and his disciples mostly hidden from anyone looking up, while giving them a perfectly good view of the tableau in the clearing. 

Five Wen cultivators were still standing, with all of them roughly equidistant from the small figure in their midst. 

“He can’t take all of us!” shouted one of them, who was probably the highest-ranked Wen left.

“He clearly _did_ take on _all of us!”_ another yelled back, gesturing with his sheath at the bloody clearing around them. 

Wu Tao held a curved, thin blade with one hand on the sheath and the other on its strange, stretched handle. Despite all the swords pointed his way, there was no sign of fear. Only the rise and fall of his shoulders. 

The rogue cultivator turned his head once, twice, and breathed out. 

“Jiang-zongzhu,” Hu Jianhong said in a whisper.

Jiang Cheng shook off his restraining arm. If he had to get closer to see—

Wu Tao vanished into thin air. The air around where he’d _been_ cracked like trees struck by lightning. Dirt and rotted leaves flew.

A Wen collapsed like a kite shot from the sky, blood spurting from his throat. 

_What—_

Another man jerked as Wu Tao reappeared, tearing the sword free from the armor gap under his arm. 

_—is he—_

Wu Tao cut down the third as he tried to flee. The man’s head rolled off his shoulders with an eerie seamlessness, like a stone down a riverbank.

_—doing to move that fast?!_

The last two Wens ran in the direction of Jiang Cheng and his disciples, and that was the last decision they made with their pathetic lives. Zidian dispatched one by knocking him headfirst into a tree, and Fang Shufen tripped the last with her sword and then struck straight down.

For a few seconds, no one said or did anything.

Wu Tao stood in the middle of the clearing, stooping to examine two halves of what had once been his hat. He looked up as they approached, visibly hesitated, and wiped his sword with a scrap of cloth. 

Then he picked his way through the corpses to arrive in front of Jiang Cheng. 

His sword, now sheathed, was clearly foreign. The finish and size was all wrong for a Nie saber and the shape didn’t suit a jian at all. It looked vaguely like one of the blades used by pirates in stories, but not mounted on a pole.

“Wu Tao,” said Jiang Cheng. At the same time, he thought, _If that’s really your name._

Wu Tao bowed deeply, like a servant anticipating sharp scolding. As he did, his sword vanished up his left sleeve—a qiankun enchantment he _and_ his robes looked too poor to afford. It just raised another question among the sea of them that Jiang Cheng already had in mind. 

“Excuse me just a moment,” said Fang Shufen, just to their left. 

Jiang Cheng nodded his permission.

Fang Shufen hopped on her sword and did a slow circuit of the bamboo grove, counting the corpses out loud as she flew. The other two disciples stood at each of Jiang Cheng’s shoulders, wary and ready to fight for their sect leader’s life. 

“How did you do this? Was that some kind of secret technique?” Jiang Cheng demanded. In the back of his mind, he thought, _And can you do it again?_

Wu Tao’s eyes flicked from the ground to Jiang Cheng’s face, then those of his two improvised bodyguards. Finally, he straightened his back and hid his injured hand in one sleeve. “It’s something Jiejie taught me.” Eyes down, again. “I don’t know if it has a specific name.” 

“Well, it should!” said Fang Shufen, as she leapt off her sword and flipped it around in her hand. While sheathing it, she continued, _“Twenty-two_ Wen cultivators dead in less time than it took for us to get here? I’d call that impossible if not for the evidence in front of us.” 

“Three of them were because of the flare,” Wu Tao said, shaking his head just slightly. “They’re meant to be seen halfway in the next village, but if you aim them _at_ people…well. It’s why some of the bamboo is a little scorched.” 

“Hard to notice the scorching past all the blood,” Fang Shufen told him, and clapped a hand on his shoulder in a way that was picture-perfect boisterous soldier. Or like a Nie. Wu Tao bent under the weight of her affection, making a noise like “oof.” Then Fang Shufen turned her attention to Jiang Cheng and said brightly, “Well, Jiang-zongzhu? I think we have to keep him now.” 

“Obviously,” Jiang Cheng told her, masking astonishment with irritability. He spared a last few seconds to swallow and steady his voice, then said to his disciples, “Well, what are you waiting for? We need to leave before more Wen-dogs come looking for their missing troops. Go!” 

Wu Tao didn’t quite follow the scramble, so Jiang Cheng grabbed his sleeve to drag him along. It was almost too easy. “But Jiejie—” 

“Whoever taught you how to do _that_ can handle herself,” Jiang Cheng interrupted. “And if you can kill more than twenty cultivators without taking more than scratches, we need you along with us more than you need to keep wandering and causing bloodbaths.” 

“I was going to help anyway, but—” 

“You can save the story for the road. Let’s _go,”_ Jiang Cheng insisted.

Fang Shufen ended up bullying Wu Tao into getting his hand looked at, because he reacted more with polite bafflement when Jiang Cheng tried it. With all six juniors harping on the rogue cultivator like he was just another peer who made terrible decisions, he folded like cheap paper and stayed cowed. For someone who barely hesitated in front of Jiang Cheng and _obliterated_ the Wen attacking force, it was outright bizarre.

“Are we walking all the way there?” asked Li Chun, as though no one had shot at her today. 

“We can’t assume that was all of them,” said Hu Yating, patting Li Chun’s shoulder and steering her toward the rest of the juniors. “You can ride with me.” 

“About the whole ‘flying’ thing…” Wu Tao began, as the others started to get excited. 

“Don’t tell me your education _there_ is lacking, too?” asked Fang Shufen.

“You said it, not me,” Wu Tao replied, a little sheepishly.

“Nothing about you makes any sense,” Fang Shufen told him. 

_Only if he’s from this country,_ Jiang Cheng thought, before setting the idea aside again. 

Several of the baby disciples laughed at him before Jiang Cheng cut them all off to get his people moving. 

Over the next bout of frantic reorganization, Jiang Cheng shouted his disciples into order and led them all on to their new destination: the gutted, but retaken, Cloud Recesses. As a waystation before they flew to Qinghe, sure, but good enough for now. Lan Qiren’s men met them along the way, not asking any inconvenient questions because Lans never _did,_ and Jiang Cheng _finally_ found a place to hide his fractured sect that wouldn’t prove unreliable in hours. 

The fact that they had to toss Wu Tao over Hu Jianhong’s broad shoulders to get him in the air was entirely absurd, but it was the only thing to get a laugh out of Jiang Cheng in more than three weeks.

“Isn’t this a little impractical?” 

“Don’t worry, you’re light enough that you won’t throw me off.” 

“I don’t know if that’s supposed to be reassuring or an insult…” 

And so it was, over the first tasteless bowl of vegetable soup he’d seen since before the world went to hell, that Jiang Cheng sat down with his disciples and asked what got them all here alive.

Li Kai immediately pointed at Wu Tao, who ducked his head and mumbled something noncommittal that didn’t count as a word. 

“Wu-qianbei—” 

Wu Tao said, hands up to play off any praise, “Anyone could have done what I did. I was just in the right place at the right time.” 

Jiang Cheng rolled his eyes. “That’s not the _point._ You helped save the lives of my disciples and maybe even the future of my sect. No one believes that you’re actually as deferential and useless as you pretend to be, especially after that display. I want information, not excuses.” 

The urge to demand any news—especially word of Wei Wuxian, still missing without a trace even now—built at the back of his throat like fire. Rage was easier to keep in his heart than worry, and Jiang Cheng was getting _so_ much practice at exactly that. Keeping his words in check was harder. 

Wu Tao watched Jiang Cheng until his voice threatened to crack and fail him. Somehow, that stare seemed to pierce right through Jiang Cheng’s bluster, because there was no fear in his gaze. Concern, maybe. If that. 

“I didn’t do this alone, Jiang-zongzhu,” Wu Tao finally said, after a silence that stretched long enough to become oppressive. “Not—that last part, yes, but when I helped your people, I wasn’t alone. Li-gongzi knows that.” This last part was accompanied by a brief frown in the boy’s direction. 

“The mysterious ‘jiejie,’ as you put it.” Jiang Cheng nodded. As one of the Lan disciples poured tea for them all, he waited long enough to thank the man before saying, “The one who taught you a technique that could kill twenty men in no time at all.” 

“Yes. She was following us until recently, too, to keep Wen cultivators off our scent.” Wu Tao’s tone and body language were downright _eager_ to talk about whatever nightmare of a woman shadowed him. “Her name is Wu Xue, and she’s the best fighter I know.” 

“And where is she now?” Jiang Cheng prompted impatiently. If “Wu Tao” and “Wu Xue” were their real names, he’d be _astonished._

“I’m… I don’t think she actually left Yunmeng. But anything more than that, I don’t know. I just hope she’s safe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun fact: Shinta/Wu Tao's sensing range is shorter than the effective range of a Chinese longbow, much like how Tomoe's is shorter than Kei's in CYB proper. Trades range for mid-combat precision. And because archery is one of the few martial paths that cultivators use without putting spiritual energy into it, he didn't have much time to react at all. 
> 
> Honorific notes:  
> The occasional "gongzi" translates approximately to "young master," while "zongzhu" is "sect leader." Meanwhile, "guniang" is "young mistress" or "maiden," referring to unmarried women of high rank.


	4. Crows

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tomoe: Meet our favorite bard-necromancer in his edgelord phase.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Tomoe's outfit](https://cyb-by-lang.tumblr.com/post/632734253150552064/fuckyeahchinesefashion-li-qin-%E6%9D%8E%E6%B2%81-this-is-totally) for this chapter.  
> Her sword style literally _is_ Hiten Mitsurugi-ryū combined with the _Naruto_ samurai sword techniques. For those of you who aren't as familiar with _Rurouni Kenshin_ , that basically translates to OP anime sword superpowers and the ability to make lightsabers at will. Details will become relevant later.

A shadow crossed the half-moon.

_Ryūtsuisen._

And the indistinct shape descended on the last man in the Wen patrol like a diving hawk. There was no sound louder than a whisper of fabric and the slide of steel, but then the intended target fell with a shriek and stunned gurgle as the blade passed from his shoulder down through his hip in one cruel stroke. 

The sound of the corpse falling got the closest three cultivators to turn around. 

Twelve brilliant golden cores remained, as obvious as torches in the dead of night. The only one among them with even half a chance of avoiding notice was a single man in the middle, who tried and failed to channel spiritual energy into a cloak against the senses.

Unfortunately, he was several months too late for that. 

_As expected,_ thought Tomoe. She shifted her grip on Yukishiro and raised it over her head just long enough to achieve a full-powered swing. 

Her blade flashed blue in the peaceful dark, splitting it better than a flare at close range, even before the glowing blade slammed into the dirt. In the split second before impact, the glow changed shape into something larger, blunter, and even less merciful.

_Doryūsen._

Earth cannoned across the road. Dust exploded from the point of impact, throwing a thick cloud of stinging particles into the air. The dead cultivator’s body bowled two men over in time for the figure to disappear into darkness again, blade doused and speed outright inhuman. 

Panic made them all the easier to pick off, especially against the backdrop of a formerly-peaceful night. 

_“What just happened?”_ a man said, around coughs. 

Twelve swords flared to life, glowing Wen red in Tomoe’s mind. 

In Nihongo, a voice in the middle of the scrambling group babbled, “No, no, no, it can’t be—” 

_Ryūkansen._

Five men reeled from a single sweep of Tomoe’s katana, delivered at a speed none of them could follow. Blood sprayed from opened throats and sliced faces, with blue light stretching from the edge to form an extra arm’s length of reach.

She landed lightly on her feet as she came to a stop.

Seven left. 

If her priority target truly recognized her, he’d have warned them. 

Tomoe raised her blade into a basic kenjutsu starting stance, hands on Yukishiro’s hilt and spiritual energy primed for the charge. 

_“Get her!”_ screamed one man. _“I don’t know what kind of trick that was, but—”_

Target selected. 

Tomoe kicked off from her starting stance even as Wen swords glowed all around her. 

_Ryūkansen: Arashi._

Tomoe leapt over the first two swords that flew through the space she’d just been. Red glowed in her mind’s eye, the enemy’s spiritual energy forming bright contrails of both wake and the flash of the future through their intent. 

Cultivators were so much easier to read than mundane people. 

Twisting her body, Tomoe weaved through her opponents’ attacks like wind. Steel spiraled futilely around her as she spun in midair.

Her opponents did not do the same in response to Yukishiro’s qi-enhanced strikes.

In less time than it took to breathe, every remaining Wen was on the ground. Their swords clattered to all across the path, no longer maintained by their owner’s power as they frantically tried to heal themselves. As though Tomoe hadn’t learned how to land a killing blow practically since she first held a bokken.

There was still some wheezing when Tomoe’s katana came to rest in the throat of the only man who had control of all his limbs, precluding more noise. The killing twist of her blade produced a squelch and the thud of a body hitting dirt. The others could bleed out by inches if she chose, but that would be unnecessarily cruel.

Tomoe dispatched each lingering opponent with a precise downward stab as she strode through their midst. 

In the distance, late-roosting crows cawed in anticipation of tonight’s feast. 

Tomoe flicked her sword to one side. The worst of the blood splattered across the trembling form of the sole survivor, who cowered in the dirt as though begging would save him. Her footsteps were silent as she approached. 

“Y-you can’t—” Ito Akimitsu gasped, hands raised above his head in desperate defense. “The headhunter couldn’t have followed us! Ghosts stay where they were _made!”_

Tomoe raised her sword blade-up, watching the play of moonlight on its bloodied edge as her soon-to-be victim wailed. He could have a little time to compose his death poem, though she doubted he’d produce anything worth quoting. If he had any honor, he’d open his own belly with a convenient tantō and leave her the business of beheading him.

There was no joy in her work. Only a bitter satisfaction of a task completed, long after it would help.

“Monster! Demon!” the man babbled, “Vengeful ghost that crossed the sea! Impossible! Impossible!” 

Tomoe let her hat’s veil slip to one side, letting her enemy view a sliver of her face in the moonlight. Perhaps he was beyond remembering that the traditional vengeful ghosts didn’t have feet. Perhaps he could finally see the name embossed at the very base of the blade collar. The particulars didn’t matter after he’d delayed the next step in her revenge for so long.

Any remaining blood in Akimitsu’s face fled it, leaving the splatter standing out stark amid the disheveled hair. He gaped up at her in utter terror. 

About what she’d expected of someone who _fled all of Nihon_ to preserve his miserable life.

“No. No, no, they were all _killed_ and _burned—”_ he shrieked, losing what remained of his dignity. He scrambled backwards on his hands, heedless of the dirt, and opened his mouth to deliver a truly piercing scream.

Removing his head was as much a mercy to him as it was to the ears of any living creature in the area. One stroke, as usual, solved the problem. 

With Ito Akimitsu dealt with, the Wen sect and its disciples had earned yet more of Tomoe’s attention. It was a subtle increase, given everything, but she knew the distinction was there. 

Tomoe carefully wiped Yukishiro’s bloodied blade, inspected it for stress cracks as best she could in the darkness, and then sheathed it. With this, there were only three targets left walking the expanse of the world. Three spineless, desperate men who’d enabled her clan’s massacre and cowered when consequences finally tracked them down. 

She closed her eyes for a quick, quiet moment no one else would ever see. Her hands pressed together, precise as practice made them, and thought, _Three more. Only three more now. Please be patient a little longer._

It wasn’t a prayer, exactly. Bishamonten had so many other petitioners in times like this that any favor seemed too much to ask. 

Tomoe didn’t make a habit of lying to herself. 

She was observant enough to have survived battle and clever enough when she needed to assess a threat. She rarely reacted without thinking. People treated her silence as incomprehension and ignorance, but she always had sharper ears than a tongue. Her family—

Tomoe stared down the impending wall of grief, inexorable as avalanches in winter, and refused to let it fall. She would have time to _feel things_ when her family’s souls were settled. She already cut away at fear or hesitation within her, as neatly as loose threads. She couldn’t afford to be caught or snared by distractions. She would _leash_ the storm and put it to use. 

But with so few targets of her revenge remaining, the voice inside her begging for _rest_ had started acting up again. 

When she had a target, was drowned out by Yukishiro’s weight in her hand, the thrill of speed, and the grim satisfaction of progress. When there was no _goal,_ Tomoe languished. 

She’d “rested” for almost an entire season in Yunmeng. The inaction ate at her soul like rot. Hiding under the eaves of a peaceful province didn’t change the itching to continue her bloody path, even though they’d lost track of Asakura Gin at the time and found no leads on the others. Even training Shinta didn’t take the edge off her melancholy. 

Tomoe pinched the bridge of her nose; more frustration than she’d ever allow herself to show around her second family. 

Overhead, crows chattered up a storm. The wind carried their voices everywhere. 

This was—she was _moving_ again. She had a glut of opponents who outnumbered her a thousand to one. She could kill them for months—and had—without running out of foes. When she fought, she felt _alive_ and could rush anywhere she pleased if it would get her closer to her goals. 

But that wasn’t the whole truth.

She still missed Shinta, the brother she’d adopted out of the burning wreckage of both their clans. She also missed her—her whatever-Wataru-was. They hadn’t defined their agreement before the attack on Lotus Pier. Wataru knew not to push and Tomoe hadn’t found the courage for that conversation. Now, the newly-named Sunshot Campaign was still young and unpredictable. Any or all of them could end up dead before they saw each other again. 

Like these Wen cultivators, who hadn’t realized that associating with Ito Akimitsu—or “Wen Taiyang,” useless as the false name was—would draw Tomoe’s wrath.

Asakura Gin and his two other retainers likely sheltered under the wings of the Wen sect, but that wasn’t Tomoe’s primary, pragmatic concern. Not at this precise moment. 

Even without the association with her target, the Wen sect soldiers would have hunted down her brother and the Jiang survivors if they had the chance. On an even more practical note, patrols carried money and food with them, and she didn’t always have the time to find any of Wataru’s caches while pursuing leads. Especially when the trail led to inconvenient locales or dead ends.

At this delicate time, any soldier seeing her techniques and surviving to report them was an unacceptable threat. Or seeing _her,_ but none of Wataru’s coded messages had indicated that the Wen knew what was picking off their men. 

While the Wen sect employed more cultivators than any other organization she’d seen on the road, they had no better mastery of armor than poorer clans. In Nihon, she’d preferred sneaking into guarded buildings and striking when her foes would be least prepared for a fight. Since crossing the sea, she mostly hadn’t bothered. Most cultivators went around in unenchanted silk like their wealth alone would deflect steel moving faster than the eye could see.

And now the number of fools in the world was slightly lower.

Tomoe considered the corpses strewn around her. Aside from her target, the rest all looked convincingly like they had been savaged by half a dozen attackers. If nothing else, once the crows descended, there would be even less evidence linking her to this battle. 

Acceptable, for this juncture.

Tomoe went to find shelter for the remainder of the night. Wen silver was good enough for any innkeeper she’d ever met, and her language skills could at least get her through that much conversation. At least, if she overpaid. 

_“Is there anything else you’d want? A bath? Dinner?”_ suggested the innkeeper. 

Tomoe shook her head once she’d worked her way through the man’s accent, merely heading up the stairs to her assigned room. As a precaution, she explored the room to be sure that there were no surprises waiting, and found only a layer of negligent dust. Much better than the minor rat infestation several weeks and half a province beforehand.

She slept facing the door and with Yukishiro in hand, ready for any trouble during the night. 

Nothing worse than usual broke this habit, at least this time.

* * *

Swirling doubts and the dogged pursuit of battle lingered through the weeks that followed. Weeks turned into more than two months, marked only by sunrises and the clash of steel. In a strange way, the monotony lulled her into a routine. Go out, ruin a Wen squad’s entire month with a night’s worth of work, then return to rest and do it again the next time information reached her ears. 

This meant that when the pattern changed, Tomoe was somewhat slow to notice. 

At least, until she came upon the first corpses she couldn’t easily explain away. 

It started simply: a knot of three Wen cultivators, sprawled around a long-dead campfire with dried blood around every hole in their faces. While corpses didn’t hold expressions well if they died slowly, these did. Whatever killed them had wanted them in agony until the very end. A cursory inspection revealed no poison or obvious head injuries, either, so Tomoe concluded that neither she or actual cultivators were likely culprits. 

A single occurrence could be written off as the work of a beast or ghost. 

But she kept finding more. Never _many_ Wen cultivators—not like the entire patrols she’d attacked several times over the last few months—but it seemed like the cause of this carnage was nowhere near as consistent in their methodology as Tomoe was. Aside from the blood, she found a man hanging from a tree by his belt, two more drowned on dry land, and several who seemed to have killed each other in a frenzy. 

She tested one of the Wen blades with some curiosity, removing it from the gut of the corpse it was buried in. The blade slid out jerkily, requiring Tomoe to plant her foot on the victim’s shoulder to get better leverage. 

Well, it certainly _started_ its existence as the “gentleman of weapons.” Tomoe had never seen a jian with a kink in its spine like this. It looked as though the blade had crumpled when the body was struck with enough force. It could theoretically be used as a prying tool now. Or perhaps as a fishing hook for whales. 

She let the corpse flop back to the ground, tossing the ruined sword onto its chest. Cultivator jian swords, proud and noble as anything, ate through spiritual power like nothing else. Yukishiro was nowhere near as greedy. 

“Interesting,” Tomoe said in a bare whisper. Her voice was rough and low from disuse, and strange to her own ears. Not that anyone alive was around to hear it. 

If nothing else, it explained why Tomoe hadn’t met any Wen cultivators on the road for a few days now. Initially, the response to _her_ attacks was to increase the number of men involved in controlling Yunmeng. Such behavior lasted until she spent a few nights making commanders disappear and allowing their men to find the corpses hanging from rooftops. Then they would spook and stick primarily to well-lit spaces for long enough to regain their bravery. Eventually, more men would be rotated through, disbelieve their predecessors, and the process would begin again. 

This killer was more creative than Tomoe was. They were using power that didn’t feel anything like the spiritual energy cultivators preferred, and becoming more efficient as they went.

This was something new. 

Something very powerful indeed.

Tomoe left the bodies where they were and made her way to the next village. It was a nice day, and the crows flying overhead were determined to take advantage of the banquet. 

Without patrols to prey upon, Tomoe knew she’d run short of resources soon. Even the magical storage places in her sleeves were not limitless, especially in wartime conditions when she needed to eat more than normal and fuel her energy expenditure. To give up her opportunistic attacks on larger Wen forces would mean abandoning Shinta and this “Sunshot Campaign” business that circulated all across the empire. As dangerous as this curse-killer seemed, Tomoe refused to do that. 

The next morning, Tomoe scratched out a note on talisman paper stolen from a Wen patrol, paid the innkeeper well to hold it for one of Wataru’s agents, and left.

She had a vague plan in mind: find a Wen camp of some description, sneak inside, and steal all of their paperwork while they slept. Witnesses would need to be eliminated, of course, but Tomoe was an old hand at that. She could even get enemy communications to her brother through couriers, assuming that no documents suited her purposes better. 

And if she was lucky, her new friend the curse-killer would also make an appearance. 

Two day’s walk brought her to the scene of carnage surpassing all Tomoe’s attacks combined. It just didn’t look like it at first. 

Honestly, her first hint was the crows. 

The second hint was the smell. 

Most battlefields stank horrifically. Whether the chosen weapon of armies involved bows, blades, spears, or clubs, entire fields and hills could be drowned in the stench of nothing but human entrails, blood, sucking mud, and varying stages of rotted meat. Food decayed in place if the victorious army didn’t fall upon it in a frenzy, starved after such exertion. That didn’t even cover the sound and sight of any mortally wounded or slain animals that usually accompanied human masters to war. 

Some part of Tomoe expected to find wolves here, bigger than in Nihon, making a feast of the corpses. Crows were almost a relief. 

“Uuuuuuugh,” groaned one of the figures in the middle of the bloodshed, heedless of the bird prying one eye out of a bloodied socket. From Tomoe’s vantage point, the shambling creatures all wore Wen red and moved like puppets.

Tomoe picked her way through the roadside battlefield in daylight, counting under her breath. Within minutes, she had identified more than thirty separate bodies with nearly as many causes of death. The shambling forms turned out to be corpses, wandering around the tall grass. Though several of them turned blank expressions on her, none of them moved to attack. 

_Hmph._ Even if they had, she was faster. Especially compared to the two with mangled legs. 

“Guuuuh,” said the walking corpse with one arm. 

Nearby, one with a missing face made a wheezing noise. More relevant to Tomoe’s interests, some of the corpses on the ground had the same distinct milky eyes and cracked flesh of those who died of some sort of ghost…problem. They just weren’t walking around yet. 

After some consideration, and carefully circling around one of the corpses that staggered unhappily and tripping over a cart, Tomoe hopped up into a nearby tree to have some space to think. The groans of undead lungs were distracting. 

The wandering dead rarely bothered her, though that was before the cultivation world collectively gathered every sword in their provinces and set out to begin a continent-wide stabbing spree. Part of it was a matter of circumstance—Tomoe was targeting cultivators, who never spontaneously became ghosts—but the walking crimes against the natural order would go after Shinta if they had the chance. She hadn’t ever determined the reason. 

Sometimes, Tomoe wondered if they thought she was as much a corpse as they were. Her heart continued beating, but the motivation behind her actions were not much better than theirs. Many of those who died unjust deaths wished for vengeance, too.

Tomoe glanced down through her hat’s veil panels, watching the dead shuffle on the ground. 

Their wishes kept them active. If these were all Wen corpses, though, their ongoing hatred of those who slew them should’ve steered them toward attack. With Wen blood dried into her clothes—probably—she was a prime target.

These corpses just looked pathetically lost. 

The curse-killer had creativity in spades, it seemed. 

Tomoe frowned and left the field behind. 

Shinta talked to people more than she did. Even if he hadn’t while they were in Yunmeng, his primary companions now were Jiang sect cultivators. If he was here, some more practical means of tracking the curse-killer would present itself. Tomoe, unfortunately, could only follow a trail of destruction across the countryside. 

She needed a different option. With any luck, the curse-killer would keep to their pattern, despite the clear creative streak.

Impractical at best. 

_Too late for regrets._

Yukishiro rattled in its sheath as Tomoe climbed back up to the road, as though agitated by Tomoe’s decision not to use it. The noise didn’t seem to attract any more attention from the various walking dead. Perhaps they had more serious concerns. 

While there were a large number of former Wen soldiers littering the landscape, it was nowhere near Tomoe’s responsibility to quell them if they were dead. 

Tomoe had much more interest in finding the cause of the bloodbath. 

Not to stop it, but to see what benefits this mysterious person’s violent streak could bring.

* * *

Eerie flute music drifted over the walls of an otherwise-silent fort as Tomoe approached, several nights later. 

Wataru’s information told her of this place, tucked into a town whose name the agent had needed to spell (badly) in katakana. It was a known Wen hub, busier than usual due to the subversive activity of the last three months. In any ordinary time, the number of soldiers involved would preclude a frontal assault, even for someone like Tomoe. At some point, her arms would get tired. 

The perimeter wall was made of solid wood and earth, dotted with watchtowers and likely reinforced by metal. It didn’t really compare to the castles she remembered in Nihon. There was little chance a mere fort could, no matter the number of soldiers inside. People simply didn’t have the money and spellwork invested in its construction to be nearly as impervious as, say, a cultivation sect’s home. 

Nevertheless, Tomoe’s solution to the fortification was the same.

After a couple of minutes spent stalking along the base of the walls, Tomoe walked directly up the perimeter wall. At the top, she slipped silently over the spiked top and along the raised walkway, then into a guard post. The prior occupant of the tower, uniformed as all the others, seemed to have taken an abrupt trip to the ground sometime prior. 

Headfirst. The corpse was still crumpled at the bottom of the nearest ladder. 

Below, people-shaped creatures milled around the yard without a scrap of spiritual energy among them. Black wisps like smoke curled around the fort’s entire ground floor. The worst was nearly opaque, masking the lurching creatures’ true number. One of them raised its head and moaned softly, blank eyes staring. 

Tomoe’s spiritual power wrapped around her limbs and sped her along her planned route into the building. She shot across the roofs until she reached the proper eave, then wove around the central tower like a squirrel until she found the correct door. 

If an army of _cultivators_ couldn’t fight off walking corpses, Tomoe couldn’t spare the effort necessary even to roll her eyes at them. Wataru would, but he wasn’t here. 

The office space within the building contained several low tables and a still-warm tea service in just the greeting area at the front. Draped with Wen red and their overbearing sun obsession, the decorations and the heady stink of expensive incense almost distracted from the corpses in Wen armor still sitting at the back table. 

Tomoe turned their heads far enough to see distinct, nearly-volcanic red cracks along the jaw and cheek. Eyes open, but blank white and staring just like the creature from before. This was definitely a part of the overall pattern, though she didn’t know for _certain_ what caused them. Ghosts and demons were her sphere only by naming rights. 

Her curse-happy “friend” seemed quite happy indeed. 

Theoretically, Tomoe should have been repulsed, or perhaps intimidated... But she was pragmatic before almost all else. 

She shoved the bodies out of her way to get at the papers below their cracked heads. These men had died too quickly to make a distracting mess in their death throes. They even hit the floor with soft thuds.

Then she ran into an actual problem. 

In her childhood, Tomoe’s education revolved heavily around combat, tactics, and mathematics, interspersed with noble arts like music, poetry, and painting at much rarer intervals after she’d shown only middling talent. While kanji were not her strongest suit, she knew more of the obscure characters than either Wataru or Shinta did. It helped somewhat in moments like this.

Speaking…was not her realm, by comparison. 

Comparison or not, trying to find important documents in a language she didn’t fully understand was difficult.

Which was probably why she spent just long enough puzzling over troop movements and supply chains, written in an unfamiliar hand and in a strange order, to miss the moment the flute music stopped. 

Tomoe felt the first, faintest pulse of spiritual energy as a warning; annoyingly close even at first blush. The thick, unearthly tangles of fog were less physical than spiritual, muffling the edges of Tomoe’s full perceptive range. 

_Untenable._

Tomoe left through an upper window to get a better look.

There was someone standing on the walkway just a hop across the courtyard, heedless of the shuffling corpses wandering below. Tomoe made out a man’s tall silhouette and her hand tensed almost without her input. In her mind, his form was a vaguely human-shaped shadow shot through with purple-tinged spiritual energy so weak it couldn’t belong to a cultivator. Their cores were like active flares. This was a smattering of stars outcompeted out by both the moon and clouds. 

And yet.

By the light of the starving torches, the black robes resolved into a chaotic swirl of fabric patterns over a hint of red. His face was handsome at a glance and held an expression of amused, almost condescending curiosity pasted over a tension at his mouth. Hair half bound back in a red ribbon, leaving two tendrils free to dangle in his face. Instead of a jian in a sheath, the only item in his hands was a black flute ornamented by a red tassel. 

So this was her “friend.” 

Tomoe rose to her full height and immediately noted that the stranger wouldn’t be at all intimidated, because she only came up to his shoulder if she was being generous. Her hat still hid her features and her intentions, and that might yet give her some kind of advantage if she was clever and quick. 

“Quick” had never been a problem. Not since her clan’s holdings burned. But here, with this opponent, “clever” might yet become one.

Up to this point, Tomoe had never killed so many men without advantages such as stealth or terrain, and definitely not while avoiding every kind of alarm. She killed at a rate that precluded survivors, but not like this. Not all at once. This man, near as she could tell, had walked directly inside and immediately subverted every single soldier with the even-handed malice of a virulent plague. It was an escalation she couldn’t match.

Tomoe bowed, one master of dealing death to another. 

They stared at each other for a long, still silence. 

_“What are you supposed to be?”_ he asked, after neither of them moved to attack. 

Tomoe tilted her head slowly to one side. Usually, someone would give their name before demanding others’, unless they were somehow of the highest rank in the room. And this man—who _could've_ been younger than her—hadn’t done so. 

Well, he had just massacred an entire outpost with walking corpses and curses. That was a consideration worth keeping in mind. But besides that, he rattled off words so quickly that a headache was in Tomoe’s imminent future. 

Tomoe hated to admit weakness. But for the life of her, she couldn’t find the word for “ally,” in this language. And in all likelihood, her tongue would’ve failed to keep the correct syllables in order. Or, for all she knew, frantic shuffling through her vocabulary would only produce an unrelated verb.

Regardless of her exact reasons, she took too long for the curse-killer’s limited patience. 

Making a noise that sounded like a scoff, he still didn’t move to draw any kind of weapon. It seemed her intentions survived her failure to speak on time. Instead, he asked, _“What do you have there?”_

Easier to handle. Tomoe held out the hand that had been on top of the troop movements and reports. The papers in it made a sad crumpling noise.

He strode closer, taking each stride with the strongest façade of ease that Tomoe had seen since leaving Wataru behind. Without spiritual energy that compared to the cultivators he’d just turned into future compost, she supposed that she was of no real concern. If he’d done all of this armed with a black flute and no other weapons, Tomoe was not equipped to attack without observing first. 

Tomoe eyed him between the panels of her veil as he took the pages, trying to pin down his intentions. 

On closer inspection, his face carried more hints of long-term suffering. He looked _starved,_ with prominent shadows under his eyes, and his hollowed cheeks reminded her of the way Shinta’s face used to look when they’d first met. Since then, Tomoe had always been careful to make sure her brother was well-fed to make up for…everything. From the pale face to the redness of his eyes, evidence stacked that no one had done the same for this young man for some time. 

_Interesting,_ Tomoe thought again, as he read. 

Despite his height and imposing powers, he was essentially held together with cheap glue and wishful thinking. One false step from collapse or ruin. Tomoe, at least, could fall back on her family’s resources if she wasn’t mugging entire squads of soldiers. 

_“Are you the one who made half these corpses?”_ His voice took on a more casual air, but it once again took Tomoe a few heartbeats to understand what he meant. The sentence was a little shorter, but more helpful was the way his arm swept back toward the crowd of walking dead below them.

Off to the left and on the ground, Tomoe could see a headless walking corpse that looked remarkably like the body of Ito Akimitsu. A second later, she noted the intact head held under one arm, like a misbehaving pet. All around the wreckage of her target were a dozen more Wen corpses, which she supposed could have come from anywhere along her bloody path. She’d never made a habit of memorizing their faces.

No one had ever accused her of being too compassionate.

Tomoe could already tell this was going to be an exhausting acquaintance, and she hadn’t even gotten or given a name yet. Or said one actual word in reply. Still, she nodded slowly as he looked up from the pages she’d stolen. 

He peered at her, curious. This close, his dregs of spiritual energy were far easier to read and predict, coupled with finally getting a proper look at his expressions. There was no actual malice directed her way, specifically, but he’d buried nonessential emotions under a thick layer of affected arrogance, spite, and a steel-hard determination to see his goals through despite the potential body count. 

It was a little like looking in a warped mirror. However, there was a five-year gap between the version of Tomoe that stood here and the one that had been quite so desperate. 

Equally off-put by something he read in her stance or blank expression, the young man said after another long silence, _“I’d leave if I were you, guniang. There’s nothing here for you anymore.”_ He even gave her the papers back.

Tomoe didn’t dignify that with a response, even after she worked out what he’d said. 

Instead of waiting, he gave a mostly-sarcastic bow and turned on his heel. The corpses parted before him like dry grass in wind, then shuffled in his wake as the sound of the flute started up again. Within minutes, the entire camp would be empty. 

_Unacceptable._

Tomoe tucked the reports into her qiankun sleeves alongside Yukishiro and her supplies. After the last of the corpses got up and walked out of the building in time with the music, she stole back into the office and snatched up the dead commander’s fine writing supplies, then followed her second heretic acquaintance away from civilization.

She did have a job to do, at least theoretically. However, Shinta’s war would need a curse-killer like this before it needed just another sword. Or even week-old troop movements. 

While a shambling horde of corpses was easy enough to follow, Tomoe tried to keep her pursuit the slightest bit subtle. She didn’t step foot on the ground once after they left the roads behind, instead sticking to the trees, and caught up in time to see the flautist ordering a fair chunk of his army to bury themselves in rain-damp earth. Dirt flew for almost ten minutes, and then the corpses were half their previous number. 

Tomoe perched on a branch four times higher than the tallest human she knew of and considered the puzzle in front of her. 

Was he planning on hiding them until it was time to strike the next target? If he wasn’t, then was this some backhanded respect for the dead as though he hadn’t killed and forced half of them to their feet again? Corpses littered half the forests near here already, and Tomoe had no idea how many were naturally-occurring monsters and how many were deliberately created to attack the Wen forces. The more she thought about it, the more this moment reminded her of burying a weapon cache in preparation for an attack. If _his_ weapons rotted away in the ground, it might actually help the earth instead of poisoning it.

With rust, at least. 

The corpses that hadn’t buried themselves simply hid. The foliage in this area would be _crawling_ with the dead for far longer than any place Tomoe had seen before meeting this…boy. 

_“You’ll get your chance to taste warm blood soon enough. Rest for now.”_ He spun his black bamboo flute in his hand with a flourish before tucking it into his belt. 

Not for the first time, Tomoe almost wished she’d had more time before the attack on Lotus Pier to ask actual questions. “Almost” was as far as she’d go, though, because she was honest enough to admit that her time spent in Yunmeng had not been productive by any measure. It took battle to drag her out of that corrosive mindset. 

_No use complaining now,_ she thought. The time since then was mostly better-spent. 

Tomoe frowned just slightly as her newest person-of-nonviolent-interest turned to leave the forest, humming the same tune he’d used to steer the corpses. It was a little easier to read his intentions without the thick cloud of obscuring energy produced by all the walking dead. Every scrap of him was building to some kind of catastrophic collapse, though it was like trying to inspect roofs after winter storms to perceive it. Until there was some melting, the damage could hide for days at a time. 

Unfortunately, it seemed as though Tomoe’s practical side wouldn’t let her leave. If there was a chance that this young man would contribute to ending the overarching conflict, she owed it to her brother and to herself to make contact. Even if she was one of the least diplomatic souls in the world. 

_Nothing for it._

If this went poorly, she _would_ run—no use keeping company who disdained hers—but Wataru would know about the emergence of a new force wielding death against the Wen sect’s army. Being able to present a new ally was more appealing than just keeping records of the damage that resulted. 

Tomoe dropped from the canopy in front of the morbid musician. She landed in a crouch that was nearly a bow, but perhaps only in Nihon, and locked down the spiritual energy she usually used to infect others with unnatural fear. This was not a scenario where such a skill was helpful. 

He’d drawn the flute immediately and put it to his lips, only to stop short of blowing the first lethal note when he recognized her. More likely he just recognized the hat.

Tomoe maintained her bow. 

He stared. _“You again, guniang. Were you following me?”_

She held out the papers again. 

Someone was going to have to tell him to slow down someday, but he’d be halfway to the next province by the time Tomoe managed to get her tongue to form the words. She couldn’t compose a sentence outside of Nihongo fast enough to explain her difficulty actually _reading_ some of the characters that people thought were commonplace. She’d never managed to hold a fully fluent conversation with a local that didn’t trail off into pantomime halfway through. 

Not for the first time, she missed Wataru and Shinta for practical reasons as well as sentimental ones.

 _“…Are you telling me you can’t read?”_ he asked.

Tomoe nodded as she got to her feet. Close enough. Better to keep him from spending most of her listening power on speculation. 

_“Out of everyone in the entire world, you chose me as your interpreter. You really must be desperate.”_ And if he could talk slower, she’d be a little less so! Unfortunately, everyone else in the immediate area was too dead for a second opinion. _“Look, I’m sure it doesn’t matter that much to you if Wen Xu’s head is a thousand li from his body. You should just—”_

That _wasn’t_ the part Tomoe cared about, but words kept failing her.

She drew her hand over her sleeve and retrieved Yukishiro from the space-warping pocket, holding it out for inspection by its sheath. The blade was securely stowed, but she let him see the entire design of the plainly lacquered wooden sheath as she held it level at shoulder height, as though to drop it into his waiting hands.

It looked nothing at all like the straight-blade jian she’d seen so often for the last five years. From the long, braided hilt to the specific curve of its back, Yukishiro was clearly a bastard descendent of some variety of curved dao, shipped across the sea and adapted to a new lifestyle. And now it visited the land of its ancestors, removed by generations and no longer fitting in anywhere.

The flautist stopped dead, brows knitting together as he lifted a hand as though to test the difference. Then, without making contact, he said in a quieter voice. _“You’re from Dongying. No wonder you can’t read.”_

Tomoe wasn’t sure if she ought to be offended. Nihon used far fewer characters and read most of them differently _and_ had pronunciation help. Sometimes. Tones alone in this country’s languages were already difficult, and Shinta and Wataru were the ones who liked to talk. They _practiced._

But this was…a better reaction than she’d honestly expected. Curiosity over hostility was the theme of tonight’s conversations. Tomoe mostly failed to participate, as usual. 

The man pulled his hand back, instead using it to brush across the tip of his nose thoughtfully. _“You probably can’t understand half of what I’m saying. Your language doesn’t have most of the same sounds.”_

Tomoe nodded, once she had a chance to translate. 

_“What brings someone like you across the sea?”_

_This_ answer Tomoe knew by heart. _“Revenge.”_

There was another pause as the flautist considered that, and then a slow smile spread across his face. It wasn’t a particularly nice smile, and the feeling behind it felt like Tomoe’s anticipation, but from the outside. 

_“Well, if there’s every chance I can’t say your name and you can’t say mine,”_ he said, no slower than before, _“how does ‘Wuya’ sound? Since it looks like you’re one of the apparently unlimited birds who’ve been following me around.”_

Tomoe caught maybe one word in four on the first pass. She had to run those sentences through her head twice to slow it down enough to parse, but she bowed once she had. She was wearing nearly all black and “Crow” in this language was halfway to her false name, so she could probably remember it. If he _slowed down enough_ to let her listen and formulate sentences.

_“Then look alive, Wuya-jie. Not that you have much competition.”_

All across the forest, the unburied dead moaned like an appreciative audience. 

Tomoe sighed as she tucked Yukishiro away again. It was easier than trying to formulate a witty response fast enough to keep up. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Enter Wei Wuxian, cultivation genius, necromancer, flute enthusiast, and one-man-army-via-dark-magic. Also Jiang Cheng's adopted brother who's been missing for three months.  
> Tomoe is also discovering that he's a bit of a chatterbox. 
> 
> Notes:  
> Japanese katana are descendants of the Chinese dao the same way that straight-edged chokutō (ancient name: tachi) are descended from jian. A lot of stuff made it over the sea during diplomatic missions.  
> (In the live-action webseries, the most prominent dao/saber in the series is Nie Mingjue's Baxia, which is a _ridiculous_ weapon. It's huge, it's thick, and it has a pattern on its blade that all adds up to "monstrous cleaver." The most of the other dao seen in the series are slightly less exaggerated.)  
> Bishamonten is the Japanese Buddhist god of war/warriors and punisher of evildoers. The historical Uesugi Kenshin was one of his devotees.


	5. Lost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Shinta and Jiang Cheng get this war on the road, while the off-screen murder road trip ~~speed run~~ goes that much faster with two participants.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's events take place over the course of a handful of days, with the first meeting between Wei Wuxia and Tomoe occurring roughly three nights before the first scene.

Time passed. 

While faster in a fight than any cultivator, Shinta never traveled any quicker than a boat or a horse would allow before the Sunshot Campaign began. Even during the first few months, staying out of the Wen forces’ sight was more important than making good time across the countryside, and that meant no flying on glowing purple jian. Two months of more serious cultivator mobilization—and freer use of their travel options—hadn’t done much for Shinta’s perspective on flying. 

Or his aptitude for it.

 _“You’re incredibly bad at this, Wu Tao,”_ said Hu Yating, after seeing Shinta entirely fail to keep his katana in the air from the force of his spiritual energy. Stepping onto the blade was out of the question. It didn’t even float back to his hand if deliberately dropped. _“I mean, even Li Jun stopped falling into the lake by twelve or so.”_

 _“I only fell in once, and I was at least off the ground,”_ said a red-faced Li Jun, then-recently arrived from Ningbo. Whatever deal he had managed to work out with Wataru was one he wasn't eager to discuss, but resulted in an additional eighteen Jiang sect survivors arriving in the Cloud Recesses with him. He had hopes for more, transferring just a little of that do-anything spirit to their forces. _“You can’t hold that over my head forever!”_

 _“We had a whole procedure for water landings just for him and anyone who’d copy him,”_ said Fang Shufen, sitting on the sidelines after an arduous meeting with Lan sect cultivators. 

While the Jiang sect could continue to use the Cloud Recesses as a secured location for reuniting with their lost sect siblings and would allow the Lan sect to protect their underage junior disciples, the entire situation grated on everyone involved. From the smallest of the juniors to the current sect leader, Jiang Wanyin, their body language and variously-powerful golden cores never lost all their tension. The air was thick with it.

In the end, Shinta made no progress in the cultivator art of sword-flying while in Gusu, though everyone seemed convinced that no one with his sword skills would fall short there. Sometimes literally. It almost certainly had something to do with his lack of a golden core, which several Lan healers puzzled over, but Shinta didn’t have any answers for them. Tomoe would know more, but Tomoe had disappeared months ago except for brief snippets of information from Wataru’s contacts. 

Shinta worried. It had basically nothing to do with her skills and a _lot_ more to do with her state of mind, and there was nothing he could do about it while she remained so far away. 

But he did, eventually, have a chance to ask questions.

_“Wu-gongzi, you’ve been staring at the wall for quite some time now. Is something on your mind?”_

From what Shinta had learned, it wasn’t unusual to see guests pause and reflect on the Lan sect precepts carved into the mountain while they waited for permission to enter the Cloud Recesses. It was, however, a little strange to see someone doing so with a paper copy in hand for more than fifteen minutes in a row.

Shinta probably wouldn’t ever be a scholar. If he had to explain his reading skills to anyone else, “functionally illiterate” was the quickest way to both be accurate and entirely shut down the conversation. It made people feel offended for asking. Or secondhand shame. Cultivators were almost universally well-read nobles who had the time and money to spend learning instead of working the fields, which made Shinta stand out like cheap pottery among jade. 

It wasn’t a new feeling. 

_“Lan-zongzhu,”_ Shinta said with a bow. He didn’t have his katana out—preferred not to where people could see him and comment—but he did use the book as a prop. 

Lan Xichen smiled pleasantly as he came fully into view. From Shinta’s limited perspective, he hadn’t had enough time to stop and greet anyone outside of his clan since his return, but the Sunshot campaign was now well into its second month. With the library somewhat restored and scattered Lan disciples returning every day, there was finally a little time to breathe. 

Shinta still thought the general serenity was a little hamstrung by the temporary buildings that served as guest quarters, but no one was ungrateful enough to mention that within earshot of any Lans. At least, Jiang Wanyin didn’t want him anywhere else. He was even more a guest than the others; an interloper twice over for being Nihonjin.

No one had _specifically_ said anything to him on the topic, but one of the Lan sect’s rules was against gossip. He expected a face-to-face confrontation any day now. 

Lan Xichen hadn’t spoken to him before today. Maybe this was it?

Lan Xichen had asked a question, hadn’t he?

 _“The Cloud Recesses is actually the first sect stronghold I’ve visited. I thought I should memorize a few things so I can tell Jiejie about it. Maybe she’ll be willing to learn a bit more about cultivation.”_ There was a pause and Shinta felt his face heat a little. _“But I can’t read these.”_

 _“Oh,”_ Lan Xichen said, a little taken aback. _“My apologies for making assumptions.”_

 _“It’s—I haven’t really talked to anyone besides the Jiang disciples about it.”_ Shinta tucked the book under his arm, then bowed deeply to Lan Xichen. _“And I’m sorry about the damage to the training grounds.”_

 _“You certainly don’t need to apologize for that,”_ Lan Xichen told him, as Shinta went back to standing normally. _"The training grounds have seen worse._ ” 

Probably not often, though. The Jiang sect was a lot rowdier than their Lan counterparts, in every sense of the word. There was a lot of crashing when learning even the very basics of Hiten Mitsurugi-ryū. Meanwhile, Shinta had yet to see Lan disciples with a hair out of place. 

Lan Xichen still regarded him patiently. _“Wu-gongzi, did you have questions?”_

 _“A few, but…”_ Shinta cut himself off with a sigh. _“They’re not important.”_ He forced himself to smile, and figured that Lan Xichen saw through him easily enough. _“I think Jiejie would’ve liked coming here. But…there’s a lot to worry about, since she’s not around.”_

 _“I’m sorry to hear that.”_ Lan Xichen offered, _“I know all too well how that feels.”_

Lan Xichen’s spiritual energy flipped around a little as he closed his eyes, like a storm in a bottle. Shinta hadn’t seen much of the elusive and silent Lan Wangji, since he was one of the Sunshot Campaign’s fastest fliers and often had better places to be. Still, no matter how powerful he was, it was Lan Xichen’s prerogative as an older brother to worry about him. 

Shinta let him have his silence. Reading Lan Xichen’s qi was like staring at the sun—even if the man was serene, his feelings were like beacons powered by his core. Even if Lan Xichen didn’t intend to wield his emotions as a weapon, Shinta had to look away, eyes sliding shut as memories were dragged to the surface. 

He remembered little moments, scattered; his mother running her best comb through his hair and showing him a loose strand nearly glowing in the sunlight the next day. His father’s cajoling face as he tried to convince Sakura to stop crying because her favorite doll lost an arm. Kasumi and Akane fighting over who got to keep the winning beetle of the village’s little tournament. 

Shinta drove the ragged edge of his nails into his palms hard enough to leave marks. 

_“I’m not—Jiejie isn’t the type to go into battle like Hanguang-jun,”_ Shinta said, a little too quickly. _“So it’s not the same thing. Hanguang-jun goes where the chaos is. She’s nothing like that.”_

Tomoe was the _cause_ of the chaos in Yunmeng. Shinta had three coded messages from Wataru’s men that traced her progress like burn scars on the landscape. She didn’t rush into battle like Lan Wangji because she didn’t wear white, almost always attacked with the element of surprise, and didn’t coordinate with any other forces in the Sunshot Campaign. 

Shinta wasn’t entirely sure why that was. The reports out of Yunmeng were…vivid. 

Had something else happened? 

Lan Xichen nodded in the face of such frantic assurances. It probably sounded like an attempt to downplay any chance of being caught complaining in front of a sect leader. _“Still, it’s natural for both of us to worry about our family in times like this.”_

 _“I’ll be too busy to worry soon, at least.”_ Shinta glanced at the wall of rules once again. He’d figure it out when there wasn’t a war going on. _”Maybe—”_

 _“Wu Tao!”_ called a familiar voice, and both of them turned to find Jiang Wanyin speedwalking up the path with his borrowed Jiang sword in his fist. He spared a not-entirely polite quick bow for Lan Xichen, now that they were peers, and said to his almost-subordinate, _“What’s taking you so long?”_

 _“Sorry, Jiang-zongzhu! I didn’t realize we were leaving so soon,”_ Shinta replied. He bowed again to Lan Xichen, already turning to obey his…superior? Shinta had never asked precisely how their arrangement worked, but was willing to accept “tagalong” as an official designation if it was necessary. 

Better than a hitokiri, at least.

Shinta turned his head back toward Lan Xichen, who regarded both of them with a steady patience almost unique among the sect leaders Shinta had met. That was a gentle acknowledgement that Shinta had to leave, serene and accepting the nature of war as requiring abruptness. He could practically _see_ a thread of sympathy woven through him and extended toward Jiang Wanyin, for being made sect leader far too soon. 

Jiang Wanyin, for all his very real volume, was actually easier to read.

 _“Apologies for interrupting, Lan-zongzhu.”_ Though he bowed to Lan Xichen before dragging Shinta back up the path, Jiang Wanyin rolled his eyes as soon as they were out of his eyeline. _“We have to leave early, because_ someone _can’t fly worth a damn.”_

_“At least I’m portable, Jiang-zongzhu.”_

_“Like luggage.”_ Jiang Wanyin’s voice was harsh, but his qi gave him away. Anticipation and genuine concern hid behind a front of bluster. Shinta already knew what his hatred felt like when it was brought to the forefront, and this was not one of those times. _“One of these days, you’ll get tossed and someone will_ miss _and then where will you be?”_

 _“Probably unable to complain about it.”_ Jiang cultivators didn’t tend to fly too high for the moment, but an uncontrolled fall was…not advisable. 

Jiang Wanyin scoffed. _“Just because you’ve had trouble with flying isn’t a reason to get complacent. You’ve made progress in other areas, haven’t you?”_

 _“This budding scholar has memorized the names of cities along our routes,”_ Shinta said, entirely expecting the response his half-sarcastic statement would get. 

_“And what about ideas for dealing with people like Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu?”_ Jiang Wanyin demanded, living up to Shinta’s intuition.

 _“...I don’t think they’re as fast as I am. Are they?”_ Fighting them would probably be fairly straightforward if they weren’t. 

Jiang Wanyin groaned. _“You don’t even know that?”_

 _“To be honest, I’ve never met either of them. That was not a part of the plan to get here,”_ Shinta told him, tucking the Lan sect rules into his sleeve for later. Apparently, the book was relatively replaceable, given that disciples copied rules for disciplinary purposes. _“I haven’t seen anyone since Jiejie who can keep up with me at all, so…”_

Jiang Wanyin stared at him for a few silent, judgmental seconds. His qi flitted from consternation to realization. Then he rolled his eyes again and grumbled, _“I keep forgetting how little you know about the war._ Why _do I keep forgetting that?”_

 _“I don’t know? I thought you had my measure almost immediately, Jiang-zongzhu.”_ Shinta had gotten the “ah, so that’s why you’re so weird” talk from several Jiang cultivators already, but only in the context that they were concerned and they’d keep his secret. Which they did. Even though four of them were all convinced that they were each his only confidant. 

It was going to be a bit chaotic later when all the secrets came out. 

_“How much do you listen to rumors?”_ Jiang Wanyin asked finally. _“I would’ve expected someone as…well-connected as you would know more about the important Wen commanders.”_

 _“It’s less that I don’t listen and more that I don’t know what questions to ask.”_ Even to feel out the shape of his ignorance. It hadn’t shrunk much since arriving in Gusu, primarily because there just seemed to be _more_ Shinta didn’t know. But instead of saying that, Shinta recited, “ _Wen Chao is supposedly the one who killed the Xuanwu of Slaughter, and Wen Zhuliu is his bodyguard. The Core-Melting Hand. And they were there when Lotus Pier fell.”_

Jiang Wanyin’s qi sank into hate easily at the mention of those names, now that he had to think about their owners, but there was the tiniest scrap of fear and remembered pain lurking behind it. Shinta still didn’t know the entire story of what happened there, and honestly never expected to get it. The business of sect leaders and the overarching war were often not entirely repeatable in less-than-exalted company. Especially when it came to the kinds of memories that haunted people for the rest of their lives. It wasn’t his place to demand answers. 

If Shinta hadn’t been involved when Tomoe’s family died, he didn’t think she’d have ever told him. Shinta still hadn’t told Tomoe about his family, but she’d also carefully avoided asking. 

Secrets built on secrets until their owner choked on them. 

Shinta pointed his face toward the path and went on, since it didn’t seem like Jiang Wanyin would, _“It wasn’t until I’d talked to more cultivators that I realized what any of that meant. The core-melting part especially.”_

 _“You’ve never even_ once _explained how you can do all of that fancy swordsmanship without a golden core.”_ Jiang Wanyin’s glare came back, almost heating the side of Shinta’s head. It was better than sinking too far into a memory. 

_“Jiejie would know how to do that. I can’t explain it.”_ Shinta shook his head slowly. _“All_ I _know is that she learned from a wandering immortal, but she’s never told me anything about how to find him or anything. Only that his last words to her were to get off the mountain and get lost.”_

Jiang Wanyin’s eyebrows shot up. _“What kind of ridiculously rude immortals do you_ have _in Dongying?”_ He sounded about as frustrated as Tomoe had at the time, and probably twice as much as a thoroughly amused Wataru had, under all the laughter.

 _“I have no idea.”_ Shinta blew out a slow breath. He would not make assumptions about Tomoe’s shishō. _“We’re headed to…?”_

 _“Qishan.”_ Jiang Wanyin waited for some kind of reaction, which he didn’t get, and then explained, _“The Lan sect wanted to lead a strike on the Indoctrination Bureau. That place still has too many of our swords.”_

 _“Won’t I slow us down?”_ Certainly the Jiang seniors said so often enough.

 _“Look at me and ask yourself if you’re a worse option than a sect leader_ without his sword.” Jiang Wanyin managed to avoid sounding _too_ angry. Just impatient and sarcastic. And anyway, Shinta felt him radiating shame and hurt like heat. It was easy enough to put the sharp tone aside. _“You’re coming with us.”_

_“Of course, Jiang-zongzhu.”_

* * *

Lan Wangji turned out to be the one leading the Lan disciples. Jiang Cheng didn’t know why he was even surprised—if anyone was going to walk directly up to the drunk bastards on supposed guard duty and start laying them out like dominos, it was going to be him. Since he was both one of their fastest fliers and one of the most dramatic people Jiang Cheng knew, even the part where he outright killed two of the guards with his quqin spells was less than surprising. 

Jiang Cheng, Zidian and sect leader robes and all, looked at Lan Wangji when he landed and thought, _Why do you have to be so fucking dramatic?_

Lan disciples streamed into view, clambering up the stairs in Lan Wangji’s wake and quickly subduing anyone who hadn’t been killed by the initial attack. They didn’t bother to secure the corpses—in Qishan, the only thing they _could_ do was roll the bodies into the ever-burning fires that dotted the landscape.

Not that concealing their attack was the point anymore. 

“Have you cleared the buildings yet?” asked Jiang Cheng, pitching his voice under Lan Wangji’s attention and addressing a Lan disciple whose name he couldn’t remember.

The disciple shook her head, without removing her gaze from her sect leader’s younger brother.

No Sandu yet, then. 

Lan Wangji, almost _glowing_ with the amount of white on his robes, said in a voice like the hiss of a serpent, “Kneel.” 

The Wen guards all scrambled to obey. If they hadn’t, Jiang Cheng already had Zidian curled up around his arm and stood even closer. He’d _make_ them. He’d beat them into the white stones and splatter their blood like overturned ink with his bare hands if he had to. 

Lan Wangji’s icy expression changed not one bit. “Where is Wei Ying?” 

And then the guard being garroted with a string _started talking._

Even in his worst nightmares, Jiang Cheng had never considered the answer to Wei Wuxian’s disappearance was the _Yiling Burial Mounds._ Horror seized him by the heart. _Nothing_ emerged from that hideous mass of resentful energy and hateful dead, spawned from mass slaughter and dealing it out in turn. 

Wei Wuxian couldn’t—the entire time he’d been gone he was really—

_No—_

Jiang Cheng reached into himself, yanked on the rising need to throw up or scream or cry, and stomped it to death solely because he had an audience. He couldn’t afford to lose himself in turmoil when the entire Jiang sect depended on him. 

_Even if—_

Jiang Cheng forced himself to look outward, to save himself. 

He watched Lan Wangji’s expression shift as though from underwater, toward horror before rage pinched his brows together. It was a subtle distinction, mostly in the angle of his head when the realization hit, and it was all the warning he had before Lan Wangji started giving nearly nonverbal orders to his disciples. 

A couple of them bowed to Jiang Cheng before leaving, but they weren’t interested in being around after _that_ information.

Jiang Cheng slammed a scowl into place and followed Lan Wangji most of the way down the stairs to the bridge. His own cultivators followed him—Hu Jianhong and Fang Shufen in particular—and he glared at anyone who dared get in their way.

There wasn’t much point. His glare wasn’t going to do anything worse than what Lan Wangji’s face promised once he could find a sufficient source of fire. Not that they were ever short of open flame in Qishan. 

Wu Tao awaited them at the bottom of the stairs, dropped off by Hu Yating before the rest of their group ascended. Cleaning his not-dao with a scrap of cloth, he looked up in time to scan their faces for reactions as they approached. Whatever he saw, he lowered his gaze and mostly listened as he continued his grim work. 

Earlier, Wu Tao had cleared out almost all the Wen guards upon landing. Jiang Cheng hadn’t seen any need to order him to the top after that. 

“Wu Tao, fall in,” Jiang Cheng told him.

Since realizing that Wu Tao was dangerously uninformed despite his skill, Jiang Cheng usually cordoned him off from the other cultivators before he could even think about asking questions to this audience. Today, more than any other in the last two months, even thinking about what he’d have to say was painful. 

Even so, Wu Tao’s expression was entirely patient. Jiang Cheng didn’t know where he’d learned it. 

Lan Wangji was never going to explain what they’d heard. He dealt with feelings through sullen silence and a face that hardly shifted until emotion broke through. He didn’t make _expressions_ half the time, and yet Jiang Cheng knew the calmest person here was a foreigner who probably barely understood that some places were too haunted to _approach._ Especially battlefields. 

How did he even _begin?_

“Were they lying?” Jiang Cheng asked. To clarify, when Wu Tao furrowed his brows, he added, “When they came down here. Did it feel like they were lying to—to demoralize us?” 

Wu Tao’s gaze darted toward the Wen cultivators, being escorted from the area under heavy Lan guard. Something in those purple eyes shifted, and he said, “No, Jiang-zongzhu. They’re afraid, not lying.” 

_Fuck._

“The Wen-dogs,” Jiang Cheng bit out half to get it into the open air to be confronted, “threw Wei Wuxian into an inescapable, corpse-infested _pit_ in the earth. Three months ago, all _I_ was worried about was that he’d missed our meeting in that teahouse. All this time, I thought he’d run to Lanling to find help.” 

Lan Wangji’s mouth tightened. 

Wu Tao watched them both, gauging their emotions as though picking though a river for jade. Before he could say anything, a procession of Lan disciples rushed down the steps behind them with a bundle of swords in hand.

And Jiang Cheng _finally_ held Sandu again. But besides Sandu, Jin Zixuan’s gold-encrusted Suihua, and Lan Wangji’s ghost-white Bichen, the Lan disciples had also recovered Wei Wuxian’s Suibian. The left Lan disciple offered it to Lan Wangji first, reaching across Jiang Cheng to do so, and Lan Wangji took hold of it before even attempting to touch Bichen. 

In that man’s defense, Lan Wangji had—for him—an expression that implied he’d still burn the entire Indoctrination Bureau to the ground before the day was done. He needed to be distracted until they could get their disciples out. _Jiang Cheng_ was still going to flatten it if Lan Wangji forgot, so he let the moment pass.

“I’m surprised the Wen-dogs didn’t just melt them all,” Jiang Cheng muttered. 

Lan Wangji ignored him and tried to draw Suibian. 

The sword refused to budge. 

_If it sealed itself—no._ Jiang Cheng bit his lip to avoid completing the thought, but the attempt failed. If the sword was entirely loyal to one master, and that master was dead, of _course_ it would refuse to respond to anyone else. Despite its irreverent name, Wei Wuxian had loved it. He’d grinned all day when Jiang Cheng’s father gave him his sword and practiced with it like there was nothing better in the world. 

“Hanguang-jun,” Jiang Cheng said, into the silence, “I’ll carry it for him.” 

Lan Wangji handed it over without a word. Of course.

Jiang Cheng, not for the first time, wished his life was less _utterly fucking predictable._ Again and again, people were torn away from him and he never had the power to stop them from disappearing. He had Sandu back, and yet all the sword was good for was chasing revenge faster. 

Vengeance didn’t revive the dead, but ending this war might make a few more ghosts rest.

They left the sprawling complex broken and burning less than hour after their initial landing. Let the Wen clan deal with _that_ when they finally realized what happened.

“Wu Tao,” he said after wrestling his feelings back into a jar, where they could ferment like baijiu. The rogue cultivator was still within shouting range. “You’re with me. I’ll explain on the way.” 

“Understood, Jiang-zongzhu.” 

And he did, _finally_ able to fly without restrictions. Even Wu Tao’s additional weight was nothing compared to the energy drain caused by flying on a borrowed sword. With Sandu, Jiang Cheng could carry a passenger longer than even Hu Jianhong, their workhorse, and had power to spare. The only bright spot in the day. 

To Jiang Cheng’s surprise, the first thing Wu Tao asked when they were in the air was, “Where are we heading next?” 

“Qinghe, to the Nie clan’s seat,” Jiang Cheng told him. He didn’t turn his head, trusting his qi to force the worst of the headwind away. Otherwise, talking during flight would be beyond useless. “I thought you wanted to know more than that.” 

“This humble servant wouldn’t presume…” Wu Tao began, against the back of Jiang Cheng’s shoulder. Then he paused, clearly trying to get his thoughts in order. Jiang Cheng kept flying, biting the inside of his cheek, until Wu Tao finally said, “With this much progress against Wen strongholds, Nie-zongzhu will want to focus on destroying the remaining supervisory offices.”

Wu Tao wasn’t a cultivator in the slightest, but his ignorance and his accent didn’t mean he wasn’t _listening._ Since Jiang Cheng had first offered to teach him what he was missing, the other Jiang cultivators closed ranks around him like a pack of wolves. Between the more than forty adult disciples, and half-a-dozen juniors, they managed to stitch some semblance of an education together. 

And, for reasons not explained to anyone Jiang Cheng interrogated, Wu Tao knew a disturbing amount about how to carry out a war from the shadows. 

“Yiling and Yunmeng are close together. They reinforce each other,” Jiang Cheng said, voice tight. “Not easy targets.” 

His heart clenched every time he remembered that Lotus Pier was still so thoroughly gutted by Wen Chao and being used as a base for Wen control. As for Yiling, Jiang Cheng’s strongest memories were of the all-consuming despair after realizing his golden core was destroyed, and of waking up later and being told that Wei Wuxian had found a way to get Baoshan Sanren to restore it if they could trick an immortal. 

It was one of the last conversations he and Wei Wuxian ever had.

Heavens help them, but he hoped even now that the Wen-dogs were _wrong;_ that he’d see Wei Wuxian again at the end of this. If he’d died so long ago without Jiang Cheng knowing— 

Even if Wen Chao hadn’t cost Jiang Cheng anyone else, making Wen Chao choke to death on his own blood would be the _least_ of what Jiang Cheng would do when he finally got his hands on him. He deserved to die in unspeakable agony. Jiang Cheng had every intention of making Wen Chao, Wang Lingjiao, and Wen Zhuliu pay in _blood_ for everything they’d done. None of his family’s ghosts could possibly rest peacefully before then.

“Jiejie’s been attacking Wen forces all around Yunmeng for months,” Wu Tao said, snapping Jiang Cheng out of his thoughts before he could sink too far into the abyss. “They’re not invincible.” 

Nie Mingjue’s already-famous defeat of Wen Xu and his entire army at the Unclean Realm was enough to confirm that, but it calmed Jiang Cheng’s rage a little to hear it said by someone else. The reputation of Chifeng-zun was already established. Cutting off just one of Wen Ruohan’s figurative arms was only the first step in bringing down the Wen army. The tyrannical bastard had one more son. 

Nie Mingjue wouldn’t hold them _back_ from attacking if they were harrying a weakened force. And if he did, Jiang Cheng didn’t think his temper would hold. 

“Any news of Wen defeats is good news,” Jiang Cheng said at last. “Anything else? Numbers? Locations?”

During the flight to Qinghe, Wu Tao explained the progress Wu Xue had made in the months since Lotus Pier fell. In his patient, calm voice, a battle map ranging across Hubei province stretched out in Jiang Cheng’s mind. Wu Tao was careful to not overestimate the impact of any single attack, but his sister was apparently more of a self-contained force of destruction than even he expected. The Wen cultivators in that territory were driven back to their shelters all across the countryside on pain of death, which could fall on any group numbering less than thirty. Even replacements were often found in several pieces if they tried to rally against the unseen threat.

Jiang Cheng tamped down on the flare of envy that followed whenever Wu Tao recalled yet more dead men left in Wu Xue’s wake. Some part of him, divested of practical concerns like running a bloodied, ruined sect, wanted nothing more than to rush out into the world and cause as much pain to the Wen sect as he could. 

_Soon._

By the end of the conversation, Jiang Cheng handed Wu Tao and his overstressed voice over to the Jiang sect cultivators who’d apparently adopted him for the length of the war. Hu Jianhong and Hu Yating traded off carrying him for the rest of the flight, mostly talking among themselves as Jiang Cheng did his best to drag his self control together long enough to attend a meeting and _leave._ The less _anyone_ had to see him fly apart at the seams, the better.

Then Jiang Cheng spotted his older sister amid the bloodshed still littering the front step of the Unclean Realm, every thought flew out of his head, and landed at unsafe speeds to rush to her immediately.

“A-jie!” tore right out of Jiang Cheng at the sight of her. 

“A-Cheng!” Jiang Yanli cried, rushing the rest of the way. Her white robes were a painful reminder of everything since the fall of Lotus Pier, but she was _here._ Alive, safe, and holding his face in her hands. “A-Cheng, you’re safe. You’ve _recovered.”_

Jiang Cheng brought both of his hands over hers, throat closing on mingled relief, joy, and pain. He barely kept his face from crumpling into tears. 

The last time they’d seen each other, she’d been bundled into a carriage while in a drugged sleep, while Jiang Cheng had been a wreck of a person almost waiting to die. 

Jiang Yanli wrapped her arms around him, burying her face in his shoulder and shaking faintly as she started to cry. Jiang Cheng’s entire world narrowed down to his sister safe in his arms, for the first time in months and months. The plan to spirit her to Lanling _worked,_ underhanded or not, and maybe Jiang Cheng wouldn’t have wanted Jiang Yanli in Qinghe when the Nie sect’s seat had only recently been retaken, but he’d _missed her._

After all too little time, Jiang Yanli pulled back to look Jiang Cheng in the eye again. Her face was still twisted in mingled worry and now fear, as the joy of seeing him clashed with reality. He saw her eyes dart past him, past Lan Wangji, and knew what she’d say before the first sound passed her lips. 

“Where is A-Xian?” Jiang Yanli asked, 

And Jiang Cheng didn’t have an answer. 

In the end, he didn’t have time, either. 

At the meeting Jiang Cheng sat through, nearly vibrating with the urge to rush out the door, Nie Mingjue gave Jiang Cheng and Lan Wangji permission to attack the last two supervisory offices. Even as Baxia trembled in its stand and sheath like a gray, caged tiger, Nie Mingjue trusted them to hack Wen Ruohan’s other son to pieces as he had Wen Xu. As the leader of the Sunshot Campaign, Nie Mingjue had every other front of the war to contend with already. Coordinating with Lan Xichen, Jin Guangshan, and every minor sect leader who contributed troops was more important than rushing off and sating his saber’s bloodlust.

Jiang Cheng only acquiesced to the departure time because there was no way to take on the task the same say as such a long flight. At least, that was what he told himself as he walked out at the end. The lie lasted long enough to get him to the Jiang sect’s section of the immense compound and find someplace to collapse for a few—hours. Hours would be better.

Suibian sat in his hands like a dead weight. Its raw wood grain and metal bindings just reminded Jiang Cheng, second by second, of its master’s ongoing absence. 

Sitting at the stone table didn’t do much to cool his head, even figuratively. There was no peace in him until there were _answers._ Sandu, lying across the table, gave him only a partial solution. For all they spoke of Wen Chao and Wen Xu as Wen Ruohan’s two arms, Jiang Cheng couldn’t hope to ignore Wei Wuxian’s absence. He doubted a monster like Wen Ruohan _cared_ that his first son was dead

“Jiang-zongzhu.” Fang Shufen’s eyes alighted on Suibian as she set a teapot on a woven mat on the table, both to protect its base and retain heat. Her voice was carefully controlled as she said, “How many of us will you take to Yiling?”

Fang Shufen didn’t have to be the one who cleared the table front of Jiang Cheng. In a world before Lotus Pier burned, they could have picked any number of juniors to do the more menial tasks and allowed her to go about her daily concerns. But they weren’t in Lotus Pier, they didn’t have enough juniors to spend time anywhere but learning, and the entire world was different. 

Jiang Cheng was still pathetically grateful that the cultivators he had were fighting alongside him now, even as he burned with hatred for those who’d forced them into this position.

Sometimes, it felt like he was going to tear himself apart like this. 

“Half,” Jiang Cheng managed, once he’d gotten his voice to resemble something more human than a strangled croak. He cleared his throat carefully and said, “The rest stay with A-Jie and the Nie sect. I’ll take volunteers in the morning.” 

Fang Shufen’s brown eyes narrowed a little, barely perceptible in the evening gloom. Then her gaze dropped back to Suibian. Everyone had been doing that since the Indoctrination Bureau, and Jiang Cheng didn’t blame them. Finally, she said, “Then I’ll volunteer now. None of us were there when Lotus Pier fell, but we _will_ help you retake it.” 

Jiang Cheng acknowledged Fang Shufen’s bow and her offer with a nod, unable to trust his voice. As she left without a further demand for a response, he gripped Suibian’s handle and closed his burning eyes. 

Meditation was impossible like this. 

“A-Cheng?” 

Jolting upright, Jiang Cheng set Suibian against Sandu on the table as soon as he spotted Jiang Yanli headed his way. She still looked heartsore and exhausted, but hurried up the steps with a tray and a single covered bowl. 

“A-jie?” Jiang Cheng glanced toward the pitch-black sky. How long had he _been_ here? “It’s late. Why are you still awake?” 

Jiang Yanli placed the tray and sat down with him, then said softly, “After all this time, we’ve only just found each other. And you have to leave again. Even if I want to sleep, I can’t.” 

Jiang Cheng felt his heart clench as though someone wrapped it in Zidian’s coils and _squeezed._ He reached out and took his sister’s hand in his. She deserved so much better than this, constantly chasing after them as the war burned onward. Helplessness ate at Jiang Cheng, but he couldn’t even imagine what it was like for her. “A-jie, it’s all my fault. I couldn’t take care of you. You have to worry about us every single day.” 

Jiang Yanli brushed loose strands of hair back from his face, then placed her free hand on top of his. When Jiang Cheng looked up again, she wore a sad smile. “I can’t do much for you right now. I can only worry.” As though the admission pained her, she tugged her hands gently free and set the half-forgotten tray and soup in front of him. “Drink it before it cools.”

Jiang Cheng blew out a wet-sounding, choked breath before grabbing for the bowl and the spoon. He hadn’t tasted his sister’s cooking since the long, anxious days before the Wen attacked. Her pork rib and lotus root soup was as warm and comforting as ever, maybe magically. 

He wasn’t going to cry, damn it all. Not again. 

“A-Cheng,” Jiang Yanli said quietly, as Jiang Cheng ate. “Bring A-Xian back. Please.” 

As if there was any other option. Jiang Cheng nodded, swallowing hard, before he said, “I will. I’ll bring him back.” And if his voice cracked in the middle, only his sister was around to hear it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jiang Cheng's tactics for incorporating "Wu Tao" with his flight-capable cultivators is basically to throw him at a knot of opponents and wait. It's worked out well so far.
> 
> Translation notes:  
> Suibian, the name of Wei Wuxian's jian, basically means "Whatever/(Do) As One Pleases." Most characters don't call it by name because, well, that's an awkward name to work into a conversation.  
> Lan Wangji's title, Hanguang-jun, translates (approximately) to "Light-Bearing Lord." Lan Xichen's "Zewu-jun" is _sort of_ "Brilliance Overgrowth Lord," but that's missing like five layers of context. (Translation's more an art than a science.) The point is that the two of them have formal, honorable titles that some characters will use to be polite, especially if they're of a lower social rank.  
> Nie Mingjue has the title Chifeng-zun, which is approximately "Red Blade Master." I've also seen it rendered as "Scarlet Peak Master." Basically, he's really good at wielding his dao/saber, Baxia. He's also the top general for the Sunshot Campaign.
> 
> Feel free to ask questions anytime. :)
> 
> Bonus:  
> [in Yiling, and in a slightly more comical universe]  
> Wei Wuxian: “No commentary? Not even for the number of corpses I didn’t use this time? I honestly thought you’d start critiquing my performance, but I didn’t see you at all during the attack. You seem like the type of person who has more opinions than she’ll ever say, Wuya-jie. I'm happy to listen—”  
> Tomoe: (shoves a pork bun in Wei Wuxian's face to shut him up)


	6. Jailbreak

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Friend-making, benevolent kidnapping, snacks, and chasing real and figurative ghosts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoilers for major reveals in _The Untamed_ and its source material, which have been hinted at since Tomoe's POV section a couple chapters ago.

A figure in black watched from a crouch as Wei Wuxian stood a little farther down the slope of the roof, seeing a pair of black-and-red shadows flee from the ghost-ridden wreckage of the Yiling supervisory office. He’d stopped short of setting fires, but anyone who’d fought for the Wen forces was worse than dead. After sabotaging all of their talismans and wards, it’d only been a matter of time before the weight of lives they’d taken crashed down like a wave. The sheer spiritual corruption after tonight would render this place uninhabitable even if the walls still stood. Wei Wuxian barely had to play four notes on Chenqing before the ghosts surged to speed the process along.

Inside the main hall and above the bed where he’d once stashed Jiang Cheng, the mauled corpse of Wang Lingjiao hung from the rafters. Wei Wuxian’s cursed entourage gloried in her death in a way he couldn’t. Personally, he barely dwelled over the view of her through the window long enough to wrench her tormented ghost from the air and force her into the ranks of those pursuing the leftovers. 

He wasn’t finished yet.

“One down, Wuya-jie. Only two left to go,” Wei Wuxian told her, smiling amid the ongoing cacophony of death. Some of his ghosts would trail Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu for the rest of their truncated, miserable lives. 

Wei Wuxian had every intention of guaranteeing both of those descriptors.

Wuya-jie hopped down silently, like her namesake, and walked directly up to him before he’d even put Chenqing away. She tilted her head a little, until they could see each other’s faces despite the monster of a hat she wore, and did not smile.

Maybe it was a trick played on him from months spent provoking the equally expressionless Lan Wangji for a reaction—any reaction—but Wei Wuxian saw slight disapproval in the angle of her brows and mouth. 

“No commentary? Not even for the number of corpses I didn’t use this time?” Wei Wuxian teased, though he knew it was a bit futile. “I honestly thought you’d start critiquing my performance, but I didn’t see you at all during the attack. You seem like the type of person who has more opinions than she’ll ever say, Wuya-jie.”

While Wuya-jie seemed to understand what Wei Wuxian said with a minor delay, she’d only produced a handful of words in the last week. And about half of _those_ were “sorry” or “thank you,” even if they sat strangely on her entirely stoic mannerisms and accent. Still, she was more responsive than most of his fierce corpses and substantially _less_ chatty than the ghosts that followed them through Yunmeng’s backroads, and so he kept talking. Sooner or later, she’d pick up more of the language or get so annoyed that she cracked and yelled at him.

It worked on Lan Wangji. Before.

“No,” said Wuya-jie, after an interminably long wait. She ran her hand along her left bracer until the qiankun sleeve allowed her fingers inside, fishing out a lump wrapped in lotus leaf that she held out in his direction. When Wei Wuxian didn’t grab for it, Wuya-jie shoved it straight into his chest. 

He folded around the strike on instinct. Neither dropping the packet nor getting knocked off the roof, he straightened to find that the leaf had come a little undone and contained two pork buns. 

Before Wei Wuxian could protest the waste of pork buns—he could feed himself just fine!—Wuya-jie walked off the roof and dropped to the ground. She ignored the lingering ghosts and wisps of resentful energy as she strode through the compound. A tiny black tiger would have been the perfect namesake if Wei Wuxian hadn’t met her where he did, he supposed. 

“Worse than an auntie at a market,” Wei Wuxian said, though he doubted she could hear him. If she was, well, Wuya-jie hadn’t made much of a habit of responding to his smart remarks, or any remarks at all. Wei Wuxian made them for his own sake. “Maybe I should just call you Wuya-ayi and cut down a little on the fussing. You’d be so offended at being called old. Or maybe you would just totally ignore it like everything else I say, except for the parts you want to.” 

Wei Wuxian didn’t know what it said about Wuya-jie that she expected him to be entirely content eating among corpses and ghosts he’d made. He knew very well what it said about him that he agreed with her judgment. 

He hadn’t planned to stay, but his ghosts would gleefully tell him exactly where Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu went. Too many of them held grudges to ever lose their scent. Though he had to spare a second to hide his face in his sleeve and cough up the faintest droplets of blood, well out of Wuya-jie’s sight, and he still followed her off the eave. 

If he kept Chenqing in hand and just stowed the food in his qiankun pouch instead of eating it, Wei Wuxian decided that was also his business. About halfway across the compound, the sound of a cawing crow split the still air, letting him know where she’d gone.

Wuya-jie lived up to her name after all. 

Wei Wuxian followed the most human croaking sound—there were always crows around him now—and found Wuya-jie standing next to a building half-sunk into the earth. Though her foreign sword was drawn, it didn’t mean much. Wuya-jie knew everyone around here except them was dead. They’d made sure of it. 

Without turning to look at him, she carved the door apart in two slices so quick Wei Wuxian mostly saw the afterimages. The usual flare of resentful energy from her sword was subdued in the moment, at least. After bashing the remaining pieces out of the frame, she stalked inside in plain view. Wei Wuxian spun Chenqing in his hand as he followed. He was willing to indulge her need to steal things for a while.

He went down the stairs, thoughts mostly elsewhere.

There was a gasp that didn’t sound at all like Wuya-jie, and then a woman’s voice croaked, “Wei Wuxian?” 

No one here who knew his name would still be— 

Wei Wuxian turned the corner, heart thudding almost unnaturally quick, and came face to face with Wen Qing. 

The three months he’d been—gone—hadn’t treated her much more kindly. His last memory of Wen Qing was that day on the mountain, when the pain from the surgery alone felt like it’d kill him and yet he’d known Jiang Cheng was safe in her hands. None of the false Baoshan Sanren haughtiness or even Wen Qing’s personal aura of intimidation remained. She’d been stripped of her hairpiece, complex robes, and ornaments, leaving her just another bruised prisoner in a cell, waiting to die. 

“Wen Qing,” Wei Wuxian said at last, like he hadn’t just killed every single person complicit in Wen Qing’s imprisonment. How long had she _been_ here? “Where is Wen Ning?” 

Wen Qing’s face twisted in agony. “I don’t know.” 

_Shit, shit—_

Wuya-jie read either their tone or their faces, stepped forward, and cut through the cell door in one swing. The door fell inward without intact hinges, and she drew Wen Qing out of the cell by the hand. 

It was, by far, the most considerate Wuya-jie had been to any Wen they’d encountered on the road. 

Wei Wuxian suspected that until she’d joined him, Wuya-jie’s body count had exceeded that of most people not named Wen Ruohan, solely because of the number of recently-dead Wen he’d discovered when establishing his ghost army. That there were no _living_ rumors about her was the other big hint. The dead had plenty to say and no one else to listen. 

Wei Wuxian caught Wen Qing when she stumbled on numb legs, feeling the chill of the dungeon even through her thin robes. She leaned on him only long enough to let her dignity recover, then let herself be guided to the rough-hewn table that usually hosted prison guards and their snacks during shift. The tea on the table was still warm, and all of the bowls were undisturbed.

All the guards were dead. Wei Wuxian’s vicious ghosts had dragged them from their posts and killed them in cells farther down the hall, not ten paces from where Wen Qing sat helpless in her cell. He’d been careful only to attack those with Jiang blood on their hands, and Wen Qing was—

She wouldn’t have died. But if Wuya-jie hadn’t wanted to break into closed buildings, Wei Wuxian didn’t know how long Wen Qing might have lingered here before someone discovered her.

“Eat,” grunted Wuya-jie, producing another set of lotus leaf packages from a sleeve and dropping them into soup bowls she clearly had no qualms using. The way her dark eyes focused on Wei Wuxian told him that she hadn’t, in fact, missed his little slight-of-hand trick. “Now.” 

Wen Qing was a little taller than Wuya-jie, and she had her pride, but even she couldn’t conceal how hungry she was. Day-old cold buns were probably better than thin rice gruel fed to most prisoners, no matter where they came from. And that was if they’d fed her at all; the Wen sect wouldn’t have imprisoned someone as important as Wen Qing, the best doctor of the entire clan, without reason, and Wei Wuxian knew perfectly well how “merciful” Wen Chao was. 

He’d get what was coming to him, and soon. 

“Now,” said Wuya-jie in a tone that refused to be argued with, staring at Wei Wuxian until he finally sighed and retrieved the food he’d stashed away before. Thus portioned, she and Wen Qing would have one each and he’d have the two from before. 

“They’re not poisoned,” Wei Wuxian said to Wen Qing, since Wuya-jie didn’t have the vocabulary for it. “She’s not the type to bother with subtlety if she wants someone dead.” 

That earned both of them even more suspicious looks. 

Still, Wen Qing took one of the bowls and, though she clearly had more than a few things to say to Wei Wuxian, just tore into the food with quick bites. Just going from her expression when she looked at him, whatever she had to say likely had to do with Wei Wuxian’s haggard appearance—he’d _seen_ his reflection—the rumors of his death, or the ongoing war he still hadn’t officially joined. She carried secrets for both of them, but, honestly, was too hungry to waste time on him right now. 

“Wen Chao imprisoned me for helping his enemies,” Wen Qing said, after they’d all devoured the meager meal. Maybe it was because they weren’t going to ask, and Wen Qing figured she owed them some kind of explanation. “A-Ning drugged every one of his men at Lotus Pier that night. Wen Chao figured it out and came for us.” 

“Wen Qing,” Wei Wuxian said with a wince, “I’m sorry I couldn’t do anything to help you.” 

“You? _You_ are supposed to be dead, according to him.” Wen Qing’s expression was still fixed with worry for her brother. “He visited me personally to tell me you’d been thrown into the Burial Mounds. No one ever escapes, Wei Wuxian. And yet here you are, cutting down entire supervisory offices.” 

Wei Wuxian _could_ lie to her. In theory. He had a hundred sitting behind his tongue for the moment he met other people who knew him before— _this_ —but Wen Qing had literally pried him open and held a part of his soul in her hands. He could lie to Shijie and Jiang Cheng for their own good, he thought, because he’d stitched himself together from resentful energy, rotted flesh, and sheer stubbornness. 

But Wen Qing was a doctor. His doctor. For a good cause—the most terrifying act of Wei Wuxian’s own free will—but they didn’t owe each other anything now. He befriended Wen Ning, and so Wen Ning saved Jiang Cheng and Wei Wuxian’s lives and convinced his sister to offer them shelter in this very compound. And when Wei Wuxian begged Wen Qing to save Jiang Cheng from a death by inches, she had. A part of Wei Wuxian never expected to see either of the Wen siblings again, if for different reasons than what anyone expected.

“A lot has changed in the last few months,” Wei Wuxian said finally, aware that the silence had stretched longer than usual for conversations where his only audience was Wuya-jie. His standards were broken. “Rumors only contain a little truth, if they do at all.” 

Wen Qing frowned. She looked a little steadier and back to her normal self after eating, and that meant all of the cleverness that made Wen Qing such a great doctor crept back in. “Except that it’s you.”

Wei Wuxian didn’t know how to tell her what it cost to even halfway justify that assurance. Didn’t know if he wanted to, either. There was an entire _lifetime_ of experiences crammed into his last three months, and he didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin explaining most of them even to himself. 

Wuya-jie placed her qiankun pouch on her lap and started digging through it, apparently ignoring the conversation.

“Who’s this, then? We haven’t been introduced.” Wen Qing never _actually_ let important topics go unsaid, but she did occasionally let them slide for a while. The only thing keeping Wen Qing from viciously interrogating him on his health now was likely Wuya-jie’s presence. 

“I’ve been calling her Wuya-jie, since she showed up one day and has been following since. I can’t seem to get rid of her.” Nothing Wei Wuxian used to kill the Wen soldiers made Wuya-jie flinch. At most, she picked over the bodies for supplies, ignoring split skulls or worse except where it interfered with her work. “She said she was out for revenge, but she can’t explain why someone from Dongying would care about the war.”

Wen Qing’s cool, practical expression faltered for just an instant. Wei Wuxian caught it solely because he knew her, back when they’d all been so different. He’d seen her worried about Wen Ning, sitting vigil at his bedside, and remembered the pain the transfer surgery had caused her even as she carved Wei Wuxian open. They’d seen each other at their lowest point, at least until then.

Wuya-jie didn’t need that much prior knowledge. Her free hand snapped out and pinned Wen Qing’s sleeve in place with two fingers.

“Wen-guniang,” Wuya-jie said, with each word pronounced as though read aloud from an invisible scroll, “who have you seen?” 

“I cannot tell you that,” Wen Qing replied, holding herself tense. 

“Wen Ruohan has servants from Dongying?” Wei Wuxian asked, ignoring Wen Qing’s reluctance. 

“I cannot give you information on my own sect’s forces. Wei Wuxian, we are still in the middle of a _war,”_ Wen Qing reminded him sharply. She tugged her sleeve, ruined as it was, out of Wuya-jie’s grip. “Outside these walls, the only thing that matters to the world is that I am a member of Wen Ruohan’s court. I need to find A-Ning and protect my people, _not_ help the enemies of the Wen sect.” 

“You’re a little late for that,” Wei Wuxian said, bitterness creeping back into his voice. He crossed his arms over his chest. Over the hollow space that ached and had ached for months. “Wen Chao was the one to put you in that cell. He wouldn’t have ever acted against you without thinking he could get away with explaining it to his father. If you go back to the Wen sect, you’ll be lucky to be executed for escaping.” 

“I will not go to Qishan.” Wen Qing straightened in her seat like her spine was made from the same steel as her sword. Wei Wuxian had no idea where it was and didn’t want to ask. “The Dafan Wen need me now more than ever.”

“Alone?” Wei Wuxian demanded. 

“Why not? _You_ two are. And it’s not as though I can trust anyone else this far in Yunmeng.” 

Wuya-jie, likely irritated at being ignored when she spoke as opposed to the reverse, finally found what she sought in her qiankun pouch and yanked it free. Unfolding a little unevenly, a dark blue robe made of middling-quality cloth tumbled into Wen Qing’s arms. A split second later, she pulled out a lighter one, edged with green and clearly meant to suffice as inner robes. And then she set a wooden hairpiece on the table with a solid _thunk._

“Change,” Wuya-jie said. Her mouth twisted briefly as Wen Qing tried to dislodge all the extra cloth, before she dragged Wen Qing’s soiled sleeves in front of her eyes. Pinching the off-red fabric between her fingers, she went on haltingly, “Too obvious.” 

“I just said I wasn’t going to travel with you,” Wen Qing protested, tugging her arm back out of reach. 

Wuya-jie raised a skeptical eyebrow that quite clearly communicated what she thought of Wen Qing’s decisions. And how likely she was to let her leave without sharing what she knew about the other Dongying people Wen Ruohan employed. In Wei Wuxian’s experience, Wuya-jie attached herself to her goals with immense force. It was worse than one of the Yunmeng special fishing hooks.

“Wuya-jie, I’m not going to kidnap Wen Qing,” Wei Wuxian told her. Wen Qing deserved better. She’d also deserved better than to be locked in a cell with no idea where Wen Ning was, but that hadn’t happened. Wei Wuxian had no intention of dragging her anywhere and compounding her problems. 

Wuya-jie blinked slowly, as though turning the sentence over in her head like an interesting piece of porcelain. Then she said, stilted as ever, “I can.”

“Wuya-jie,” Wei Wuxian began, irritated now. “That’s not how this works—” 

“What exactly is your goal here?” Wen Qing interrupted, though Wei Wuxian could have probably verbally run them both over if not for their combined aura. It reminded him of Shijie, but with considerably sharper angles. “Why insist on dragging me along?” 

Wuya-jie looked between the two of them, deliberate as she’d been all week until this conversation began, and closed her eyes. She had both of her hands tucked neatly into her lap, as though in meditation. Her lips moved, sounding out something that didn’t seem like any language Wei Wuxian knew, before she took a slow breath, and said, “Wen Chao.” 

His name, in her mouth, sounded like the deepest insult she could offer.

“Didi asked for help.” Here, Wuya-jie let out a faint noise of frustration, apparently unable to find the correct words to put in order, “And Jiang sect ran with him. Wen sect tried to follow.” She lifted one hand to point toward her grim face, then said, “Stayed to fight.” 

“How many?” Wei Wuxian burst out, unable to avoid interrupting any longer. Under Wuya-jie and Wen Qing’s stares, he clarified, “How many Jiang cultivators survived? Back then—back then there weren’t any. When Wen Ning saved us.” 

Wen Qing's face twitched toward sympathy, but it was clear she had relatively little to spare. At this point, almost all of it had to be saved for Wen Ning and her fellow Dafan Wen, not strangers.

Wuya-jie paused. As Wei Wuxian’s heart stammered in his chest, she raised her hand and turned her attention to a puddle of tea left on the wooden table after the previous residents had made their abrupt exit. With a fingertip, she sketched out some phrase. When she was done, she sat back a little and let Wei Wuxian peer closer, patient as stone.

The characters for “forty” were written in neat, precise strokes that left trails of tea only just visible in the low light. 

It wasn’t enough. Jiang Cheng must have recruited people since the start of the Sunshot Campaign to get anywhere, but forty more survivors were more than Wei Wuxian had realized he could hope for. Forty more faces he’d recognize and who’d see him from before Lotus Pier burned. Wei Wuxian barely remembered what the version of him they’d know looked like.

He’d return to Jiang Cheng’s side as soon as he settled the score with Wen Chao.

“Leave and die,” Wuya-jie said to Wen Qing, even as she dug through the qiankun pouch for something else. When the search came up empty, she finally said, “And save _nothing._ Not Dafan. Not Qishan.” 

Something flashed in Wen Qing’s eyes, her brows tilting in anger.

“Wen Qing, I think I know what Wuya-jie’s trying to say,” Wei Wuxian said, before they could start a second argument. It was faster if they just skipped it. “If you come with us, there may be a way out for your people. Something other than staying with Wen Ruohan to the end and—” Considering the character of the major clans involved in this war… “—and dying with him. If we can talk to Jiang Cheng—” 

“Jiang-zongzhu lost the entire Jiang sect to our Wen sect. There’s no going back, Wei Wuxian,” Wen Qing argued.

“But you’re the ones who sheltered us when we were on the run,” Wei Wuxian argued back. “Even with what happened afterward, we _personally_ owe you and Wen Ning our lives. Maybe even the Wen soldiers you brought with you.” 

Wen Qing’s expression shuttered. “Wen Chao dealt with them. Those who weren’t transferred were executed.” 

Of course. The rank and file weren’t important enough to keep alive. So the Wen siblings had _no_ soldiers loyal to them anymore. It made it that much harder to formulate a plan to get them to turn, because only bringing themselves would get them rejected by most major clans for low contribution. They’d be branded traitors or war prizes in an instant. 

Only Wei Wuxian knew how to turn the Wen sect’s overwhelming numbers into their biggest weakness. Only Wei Wuxian, Jiang Yanli, and Jiang Cheng knew how much they owed the Wen siblings. They weren’t in a strong enough position to wage war from most viewpoints. The Jiang sect should be extinct.

Or perhaps not. “Wuya-jie, is your ‘didi’ still with the Jiang sect?”

Wuya-jie nodded. “Jiang-zongzhu.” 

Specifically traveling with Jiang Cheng, then. Okay. Wei Wuxian could work with this. Just needed to talk fast and hopefully avoid too many witnesses to what was probably going to be one hell of an argument.

One more worry on the pile. 

“Wen Qing, come with us. I promise,” Wei Wuxian said, as he held up three fingers in a solemn salute, “that I’ll do everything in my power to help you.” 

Wen Qing looked at Wei Wuxian with skepticism that wasn’t totally unfair. “After you kill my cousin.” 

“You as good as said that you were abandoning him to me,” Wei Wuxian countered, wondering why in the world she always felt the need to make things difficult. “And he might know where Wen Ning is right now.” 

Wen Qing went very still for a long few seconds. For a breath or two, Wei Wuxian was sure even this tack would fail and Wen Qing would rush off alone to whatever fate the world had in store for her. 

Wuya-jie reached for the hairpiece, slow and deliberate. 

Wen Qing grasped the robes in her lap, snatched up the hairpiece, and said, “Get out so I can change.”

* * *

Shinta held two pieces of a door in his hands and thought, _She’s been busy._

Jiang Wanyin and Lan Wangji were horrified by the damage done to the Yiling supervisory office and had been quietly arguing about it ever since they walked inside the main building. Something to do with the way everyone had died. 

Shinta hadn’t been in direct contact with Tomoe since leaving Yunmeng the first time. 

Shinta picked his way through each of the buildings anyway. Along the way, he searched for evidence of Tomoe’s presence the same way that people looked for signs of bears. He knew people would be in awe of a powerful killer, but had no idea what the encounter would bring if people made poor decisions in the moment. 

_“What’s wrong, Wu Tao?”_ asked Fang Shufen, who had decided formality could go out the window after the third time she picked Shinta out of the air after flight practice failures. _“I mean, besides the obvious aura of death and suffering.”_

 _“Jiejie’s been here,”_ he said, and set the chunks of wood aside. 

Fang Shufen stared at him. Her spiritual energy flared a little in surprise. _“Here? How can you tell?”_

 _“The door still feels a little like her qi. She cut through it to get down here for some reason, and I’d like to know why.”_ With that, Shinta descended the stairs with Fang Shufen and stepped into a room that reeked of rot, waste, and very long residence. 

_“Looks like any other dungeon,”_ Fang Shufen commented, with a sleeve raised to cover her mouth and nose. The smell was definitely something worth avoiding. _“The curses outside went right through these protections, too. Usually they’re stronger in places like this. Sort of like execution grounds.”_

Shinta made a “mn” noise and walked the length of the building, noting dead guards with clawed-out throats in a few of the cells. Aside from the usual lack of care shown to prisoners, the hay was molded and the remnants of food looked stale and forgotten. The doors were mostly dangling open as though they stood empty before, but one of them had neatly sliced hinges and lay flat on the floor. Whoever had been in here was the one that Tomoe freed, and Shinta had no idea why. 

_“Maybe this will be useful,”_ Fang Shufen said, and Shinta turned to find her at the center table, which gave the former guards a decent vantage point to look into all the cells. She pointed toward something near the abandoned dinner.

And then Jiang Wanyin’s voice rang out down the stairs. _“Everyone, we’re leaving!”_

 _“Or not,”_ said Fang Shufen, already heading out to join her sect leader.

 _“Or not,”_ Shinta agreed. He stopped long enough to glance at the table she’d abandoned, noting the odd tea stains on wood, and then headed up to see what everyone else had found. 

_“There you are,”_ Jiang Wanyin said impatiently. Once again, anger masked worry. Maybe he thought the lingering ghosts of slain soldiers would kill anyone he let out of his sight. 

Next to him, Lan Wangji was as still as a statue, but radiated concern the same way his brother had before this journey began. He had a yellow talisman clenched between the fingers of his only visible hand. A few other pieces of talisman paper, ordinarily stuck to doorways and windows, were now on the ground and trampled. Shinta didn’t know what it meant if that was the only noticeable change since he and Fang Shufen had gone investigating. They seemed like the target of a lot of people’s attention all of a sudden. 

_“Find any survivors?”_ Jiang Wanyin prompted them. 

_“Evidence of an escaped prisoner,”_ Fang Shufen volunteered. _“No surviving Wen.”_

 _“And Jiejie’s been here,”_ Shinta said, since Fang Shufen hadn’t. 

Jiang Wanyin visibly paused. Something had not meshed with the story as he understood it. _“Do you think she could have done all this?”_

Shinta felt the conflicted hope and fear tangled up in every golden core around him. Jiang Wanyin’s foremost feeling was a grim satisfaction at the damage done to the Wen sect. Lan Wangji was too busy with a gut-deep worry for someone else. The other cultivators were mostly afraid of whatever had caused all this carnage. 

_“Not like this,”_ Shinta said, giving no sign that he’d spent a few precious seconds reading everyone’s mood. _“But either she broke out of the cell down there, or she freed someone else we still haven’t found.”_

Until he said it aloud, Shinta hadn’t even really thought about the idea that Tomoe could be overpowered or captured. He didn’t have the precision to know which strike in the prison had happened first, but the pieces of door had been on the inside of the building. _Something_ changed down there, and Shinta only knew that Tomoe wasn’t the type to bother with talismans, or with ghosts. She knew how to kill in a much more straightforward way.

He’d once seen Tomoe kill a bandit with a hair stick and raw qi shaped into a wakizashi. Shinta didn’t think for a moment there was a cell in Yiling that could hold her. 

But he didn’t _know_ what happened here.

 _“Either way, we’re getting closer to meeting her.”_ Shinta kept his face grim. And when they met her, she’d probably be incredibly unfriendly. As usual.

 _“Leaving that aside,”_ Jiang Wanyin said, after waiting to be sure Shinta was finished with his report, _“this place is finished. Since Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu aren’t among the dead, we’re still in pursuit. Everyone, get in the air.”_

And the chase went on. 

On each hour, the Jiang cultivators passed Shinta off to each other to avoid placing the burden of carrying him on any one person. Sometimes they talked, and sometimes they didn’t, but they only landed to rest at all when it meant they could walk in daylight as opposed to trying to fly into the rising sun. They flew toward Yunmeng because the only supervisory office left was in Lotus Pier, not because they had better information. 

There was probably some kind of dark poetry about how they almost immediately stumbled onto another dead Wen patrol on a backroad. 

Much like the cultivators who’d silently died in the Yiling supervisory office, dozens of men lay strewn across the landscape with horrible deaths on full display. Some men were run through by their own swords. Others had clawed out their eyes or throats. Still more had drowned on dry land. It was a massacre in broad daylight, brought on by ghosts or curses or some other strange, unearthly killer. 

The ones who were further in the back, however, had been hacked to death by weapons. 

_“Most of them were facing the same way,”_ said Li Jun. He pried one corpse off the ground and looked even more ill. The dead man’s face was a ruin of horrific boils and burns. _“Definitely a curse.”_

 _“Whoever’s responsible for this can’t be moving with a lot of people,”_ said Hu Jianhong in his soft voice. The bodies nearest him were headless and surrounded with pools of dried blood in the dirt. _“There aren’t enough footprints for a full battle.”_

Shinta broke formation again, picking his way through the corpses who had been killed with weapons. Though the sight of a katana cutting through flesh could be mimicked by any number of other weapons with single edges or with a curve. Tomoe had realized that years ago. One of her best tactics since her clan’s downfall was to use her qi to shape different weapons around Yukishiro, disguising her kills if not for the faint brush of her qi left behind. 

They were getting closer. Either that or Tomoe put more strength into killing people than she did into breaking locks. 

_“Well?”_ Fang Shufen asked. 

Over her shoulder, a couple of Lan cultivators almost looked like they were tempted to break formation to see what they could find out, but were too used to rigidly sticking to their two neat rows behind Lan Wangji.

Shinta hadn’t gotten everyone’s names before they started flying, and now it was a little awkward to ask. Instead of speaking to the Lan group, he said to the Jiang contingent, _“The ones killed by weapons are because of Jiejie. I don’t know about the cursed ones.”_

He could only assume Tomoe had made some very creative friends.

And he was loud enough to be overheard, which probably killed some of the more obvious urge to eavesdrop. At the same time, he doubted anyone’s read of this situation felt any better. Either the Wen cultivators were dying as a result of an unknown foe no one had ever heard of, or Tomoe was going to be mythologized as a new goddess of death by cultivators with too much time on their hands. 

Either way, the question wasn’t going to be answered until they caught up. When a Jiang informant rushed up to them on his sword and shouted that Wen Zhuliu and Wen Chao had been spotted ahead, no one had time to ponder those questions around the bodies that raised them. If they had, Jiang Wanyin might have exploded from all the conflicting emotions jammed inside his chest. 

Shinta wisely decided to stay silent in the face of _that._

 _“Do you think this could be Wei-qianbei?”_ Li Jun wondered later. He frowned a little as they walked, at the back of the column due to his lack of seniority. 

_“The Wen sounded sure he’s dead.”_ Hu Jianhong seemed to stoop a little at the thought. His grasp over his qi was too secure to waver much, but the grief there was still fresh. He was only back here to escape the tension between Lan Wangji and Jiang Wanyin at the head of their group. _“Wei Wuxian would’ve come back to us if he had any choice.”_

 _“The Wen can be sure of anything they want,”_ Li Jun snapped, _“but that’s not the same as them being_ right.” His fingers clenched over the hilt of his sword. _“And if this_ is _him, I don’t care what else is going on as long as he comes back at all. I’m sick of losing people.”_

Shinta, who was also at the back of the column (due to being a rogue cultivator), glanced between the two of them with some trepidation. _“I don’t think I met Wei Wuxian before everything happened.”_

 _“You were busy, weren’t you? You have an excuse,”_ Li Jun said dismissively. For all his bluster, he stepped neatly around the whole Nihon business and whatever had happened with Wataru with surprising grace. Shinta doubted the Lans knew what he was referring to. _“Rogue cultivators usually don’t run up to the first disciple of any big clan and just say hello. Outside of the Jiang sect, you’d be lucky if they didn’t pretend you didn’t exist.”_

 _“A-Jun,”_ Hu Jianhong said quellingly. 

_“It’s not a lie and you’re not a Lan, so get off my back.”_ Still, he did abandoned the topic. _“Wu Tao, your sister would send you a message or something if she found Wei-qianbei, wouldn’t she?”_

In a perfect world, yes. In the one they lived in, Shinta knew Tomoe hid in their Yunmeng house for the majority of the season. Her very rare trips to the river or the market never coincided with festival days or ceremonies. It had been an ongoing trial to get her out of her room regularly. The only way she might have met any Jiang sect cultivators before the night Lotus Pier burned would’ve been if one of them crashed through the roof. 

At most, she might have seen one of the wanted posters the Wen sect set up for the three Jiang survivors they’d known about. Given the abrupt drop-off in the relevance of that manhunt, and Tomoe’s apathy toward the Sunshot Campaign’s cause, Shinta decided not to get Li Jun’s hopes up.

 _“I’d like to think so, but we’ve been traveling a lot,”_ was what Shinta told Li Jun, because Tomoe’s story wasn’t their concern. They’d have to be very lucky to get a note from Tomoe while flying all over the empire. 

Or maybe Wataru would need to start subverting cultivators _and_ messenger birds. 

Li Jun huffed in frustration, but he let the topic drop. Especially after Hu Jianhong dropped a huge hand on his shoulder in a clear sympathetic pat, which only coincidentally almost knocked him to the ground.

As they marched onward throughout the day, Shinta kept mostly quiet. It was easier than getting involved in the group’s tension as they speculated and worried and tied themselves in knots. 

Especially since Shinta’s most prominent thought was this: _Well,_ _Tomoe has definitely made a friend._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Ayi" is both a term for a maternal aunt and a possible generic term when referring to older women one isn't related to, but views as family. I say "possible" because it's what my mom sometimes tells me to call her friends, so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯ I'm not an expert. Feel free to correct me as we go. 
> 
> Personally, I think the most important words to learn in any foreign language are the terms for "Hello," "Sorry," "Thank you," and "I don't understand." The other most important one is "bathroom." 
> 
> Literally every time I wrote about the food, I remembered the existence of lo mai gai and got a serious craving for dim sum. Even though this is entirely the wrong region for that cuisine.


	7. Reunion

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's been a long three months for everyone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter was looked over by several kind people, so all remaining errors are my own.

The hunt came down to a travelers’ inn among Yunmeng’s backroads. 

The moon was waning just slightly as the combined Lan-Jiang group marched through the afternoon and into the evening. To avoid spooking their prey, no one flew over the course of the two-hour trip. Their sword glares might have given the game away if anyone thought to look, though the thick tree cover could have given them some cover if not for Wen Zhuliu’s presence. Wen Chao was in a terrible hurry to flee toward Lotus Cove, damn the consequences. At the same time, Wen Zhuliu wouldn’t let haste kill the man he was honor-bound to protect. Jiang Wanyin, though he didn’t say as much, was ruthless enough to harry them to death if he couldn’t just make it rain arrows. He didn’t think anyone with him could fight Wen Zhuliu directly; he thought that the group’s token ronin might try, but didn’t want to make plans based on it. Shinta, for his part, was the kind of person who would make the attempt. Even if it was a choice that could potentially kill him.

Tomoe was informed of all these details long after they were relevant. 

In the moment, Tomoe perched in the lower boughs of a tree as Wen Zhuliu skulked into the inn. Though the man wore a cloak to hide his clan’s colors and hadn’t been flying for days, tracking cultivators had not become miraculously more difficult for Tomoe since gaining two traveling companions. The addition of Wen Qing made no difference, aside from the uptick in full conversations with two participants and a slightly quicker depletion of Tomoe’s food stockpile.

Tomoe dropped out of the tree and found Wen Qing and Wei Wuxian in the underbrush nearby. When they looked up from their ongoing argument, Tomoe held up two fingers and pointed in the direction of the building. 

_“No one’s working there now?”_ Wei Wuxian asked in a whisper. He probably already knew—ghosts had been reporting to him in the form of off-putting smoke apparitions for days. Sometimes it helped to have a living person confirm their reports. 

Sometimes the bloodbath started almost before word came back to them, and Tomoe cut down the stragglers. At least she’d been getting better at listening to fast-paced languages outside of Nihongo. Wei Wuxian and Wen Qing had different accents that pushed her mind to keep up. 

Tomoe dropped her hand and said, _“No.”_ The only living beings in the immediate area were them and a smattering of animals. Most of which would run once the dead walked into their midst.

For now, they had something approaching privacy.

Wei Wuxian’s eyes drifted shut, and he tilted his head as though listening to a voice no one else could hear. Though it was dark, the chill of a nearby ghost required no special senses to detect. When it passed through the air between Wei Wuxian and Wen Qing, the shadow it cast felt like a cloud crossing over the sun that was Wen Qing’s golden core. Tomoe was in no way an expert on manipulating the dead. She stayed well out of any of their conflicts to avoid inflicting her ignorance on them.

 _“You probably won’t want to watch this, Wen Qing,”_ Wei Wuxian said quietly as he spun the black flute of death’s own hand between his fingers. _“I’ve been thinking of what I want to do to Wen Chao for months.”_

Wen Qing’s brows slanted together with irritation. _“Only after he tells me what happened to A-Ning.”_

_“Wen Qing—”_

_“I am your prisoner, however technically, and not for the first time,”_ said Wen Qing, with a glance at Tomoe that conveyed more suspicion than normally tolerable. Wen Qing’s circumstances gave her more leeway with Tomoe than nearly any other person had ever earned. _“All I can do is ask. You know that.”_

Her general state of being over the last few days had been fear for her brother, a thin crimson thread of rage, and half-affected annoyance at Wei Wuxian’s inability to handle his own health. The last was more of a cover for the first two, layered over the top like a veil. In Tomoe’s spare clothes instead of Wen red, she appeared smaller than she actually was, and held together with prayer and spite. 

Personally, Tomoe thought any true prisoner would be a little less likely to threaten Wei Wuxian with silver needles they’d retrieved from Yiling, but decided not to comment on foreign customs. She just kept them fed and tried to stay out of fast-paced arguments. 

_“And Wen Zhuliu?”_ Tomoe asked, flexing her fingers along Yukishiro’s hilt. The name felt heavy and unwieldy on her tongue, despite how many times she’d heard it said. 

_“Too loyal to Wen Ruohan to give you anything,”_ Wen Qing said immediately. Her gaze flicked downward, as though in shame. 

Tomoe pointedly avoided saying anything else, having used her allotment of words recklessly. She didn’t necessarily like Wen Qing—didn’t like most people—but her cruelty was reserved for enemies. This was too close to the line. 

Wei Wuxian rose to his feet, flute finally still in his hands. While there was a flash of red in his eyes, and the ghost whispers were a little louder, Tomoe followed him into the courtyard only a step out of time. Wen Qing’s footsteps were just behind her, though all of them knew this had nothing to do with eagerness to see a family member torn limb from limb by walking corpses. It was simply that she had nowhere else to go.

While flute music drifted eerily through the air, swirling ghosts condensed into coherent shapes. Some of them were people they’d killed earlier this week. Others looked like the ghosts of dead brides, still dressed in red with long, sharp nails they flashed in the moonlight. Below them, Tomoe recognized the corpse of Ito Akimitsu still lurching around while clutching his head, among a crowd of fellow walking dead. Low groans rose from hollowed throats, just under the sound of the wind howling through the trees. While the worst of the undead army were hidden—a grisly precaution if the Wen duo escaped—any outside observer would know instantly there was something deeply disturbing happening here. 

Like the supervisory offices, Tomoe suspected this place would be left unfit for human habitation by the time they left. The only recourse involved fire. 

Mist curled around the ankles of those living who were sharing the gloom. 

Two golden cores awaited them on the second floor. Their owners contrasted sharply; one radiated an animalistic, primal terror down to the very center of his being, while the other was a familiar combination of wariness and bone-deep resignation. Wen Chao and Wen Zhuliu, in that order. Wei Wuxian didn’t make it much of a secret where his ghosts went during the times Tomoe and Wen Qing couldn’t see them. “Tormenting his foes” seemed a worthy enough use for all that hatred. 

Wen Qing kept her spine straight as an arrow as they entered the building. 

One of the men inside the upper room stirred. His focus was targeted toward the door and battle-hardened. Wen Zhuliu, then, had noticed the pursuit closing in and expected to make a last stand. Perhaps he even realized that they were surrounded in more ways than one. Tomoe made a mental note to go for his hands first. 

The other shrieked and cowered. Like he had the last two times. 

Tomoe left her hand on Yukishiro’s hilt. Based on Wen Qing’s emotional state, she didn’t expect a sudden betrayal, but Tomoe wasn’t interested in having a blood member of the Wen clan at her back when there was a chance swords would become relevant. Wen Qing was, aside from those needles, unarmed. 

Wen Qing drew a slow breath and looked up at the lanterns swaying wildly across the ceiling, as much driven by the wind as by the smokelike energy Wei Wuxian wielded. 

Tomoe tilted her head to one side just slightly as more cultivators arrived within her sensing range. They hovered at the edge, past the perimeter formed by the storm of Wei Wuxian’s undead army. At her estimate, they were still some fifty paces away and “blurred” by the presence of so many restless dead, which made it more difficult to determine their numbers. While she didn’t have a perfect mental picture of how each of the cultivation clans’ qi felt, there were no Wen soldiers in that group. 

There was one relative dark spot among the burning stars: Shinta. Unlike his companions, he kept his qi relatively subtle because it wasn’t crystalized in his torso. It was also a method of avoiding attention that hardly mattered outside of Nihon. 

Half the incoming cultivators were probably Jiang sect disciples, then. Unless Shinta made even more friends. 

Wei Wuxian pulled his flute away from his mouth and started up the stairs. Each of the candle-lit lanterns on the ground floor glowed with uncanny blue light that shed no heat, casting each of their faces in stark relief. More sprang to life on the second floor as they ascended. 

Wen Qing stopped short of entering the suite on the second floor. 

Tomoe, too, stopped at the threshold and cast her gaze toward Wei Wuxian between the veil panels on her hat. She didn’t need much lead time to launch an attack from cover. This was his grudge to handle. 

Wei Wuxian strode inside without a pause or flinch of any kind, flute tucked neatly against his back. 

The cultivators now on the roof curled up on the tiles, attention pointing downward. Shinta’s qi seemed to blink once Tomoe entered his range, but the recognition and affection was quickly smothered in favor of putting his mind back on the current mission. That screaming wreckage of a man seemed to just attract all types of unfriendly regard. 

Wen Qing pulsed with worry. Her hands tightened over each other in her sleeves, and the tension just increased as she fought with herself over what to do next. The actual, real-world time she spent between warring impulses to stay or go was only a handful of heartbeats. 

Then she walked in. 

_So this is how it’s going to be. A dramatic confrontation, solely because this is what honor demands?_ It was perhaps cynical of her; Tomoe despised a fair fight. Her most successful tactics involved little in the way of honor. 

Tomoe suspected there was some sort of peephole into the relevant room, because she felt the two cultivators on the roof jolt in shock as Wei Wuxian finally reached melee range with Wen Zhuliu. The cores of the Lan and Jiang (she assumed) were each so powerful that she could probably have destroyed them in any gambling den from here to Shanghai, no matter how drunk she was at the time. 

Tomoe slipped into the room on silent feet, last in line and technically farthest from the fight. 

_“Wen… Zhuliu,”_ whimpered a voice that had cracked from screaming. Wen Chao was somehow even more pathetic in person. Hiding under a cloak would not save him. 

_“Do you really think calling him will be of any use?”_ Wei Wuxian asked the cowering lump.

Wen Zhuliu stood nearly directly in front of him, while clearly being deliberately dismissed. He was probably at least a decade older than Tomoe, bearing little sign of Wei Wuxian’s ongoing campaign of torment. No emotion awaited dissection on that face. Even his traveling cloak and gloved hands were free of excess wear. The only sign of any fatigue was the slight dimming of his core and faint shadows under his eyes. 

_“Wen Zhuliu,”_ Wei Wuxian said with a faint twist of amusement in his tone, _“surely you don’t think you can keep his rotten excuse for a life safe from me now.”_

 _“I’ll fight to the death for it,”_ Wen Zhuliu replied. 

_Yes, you will,_ Tomoe thought. She edged closer to the confrontation, mirroring Wen Zhuliu’s attempt to bodily block Wei Wuxian’s path to his master. 

In neither case did it make much of a difference. 

_“Such a loyal servant,”_ Wei Wuxian said, not reacting to either movement. 

_“I must repay His Excellency for the kindness of appreciating my talents,”_ Wen Zhuliu said. And unless Tomoe had her angles and eyelines wrong, part of that remark was directed at Wen Qing beside her. 

_“What a joke!”_ Wei Wuxian scoffed. His feeble qi sparked in anger. _“Why do other people need to pay the price for your gratitude to Wen Ruohan?”_

Wen Qing flinched. Just barely.

At the same time, Wei Wuxian brought the flute out from behind his back. He was mid-motion, ghost smoke gathering at his hands, when Wen Zhuliu swung at him with one empty palm—

_—Not as fast as shinsoku—_

—and then Tomoe slammed Yukishiro’s sheathed form into Wen Zhuliu’s side, knocking him off course before his fingers could even brush the front of Wei Wuxian’s robes. 

Wen Zhuliu didn’t crash to the floor solely because of the strength of his stance. And the fact that his back heel struck a wall, which cracked and shuddered. When he lifted his head, hair not one whit out of place, something in that calm gaze had gone blank and dead even while he still breathed. It only took a single exchange of blows to give an experienced warrior their opponent’s measure. 

He was not leaving this inn alive. 

_“Not necessary, Wuya-jie,”_ Wei Wuxian said softly, even as Tomoe returned to her null stance. He blew a handful of quick, sharp notes into the gathering ghost smoke that formed an eerie melody, and every candle in the area flared with blue-green foxfire. 

Behind Wen Zhuliu, a red-wreathed ghost swept into the room with her long nails extended, gleeful malice in her pale face as she reached for Wen Chao’s shaking form. 

Wei Wuxian angled his head a little toward the future bloodbath, as a teasing hint toward Wen Zhuliu. 

Wen Zhuliu turned, because he was able to take a hint, and the surge of aggression in his qi practically propelled him across the room to lunge at the ghost tormenting his master. Going by shouts of pain when Tomoe spared a few heartbeats and glanced at the ceiling (and the rabbit-sized hole in it), such noble intentions weren’t prevailing. The ghost could effectively fly, contained only by the shimmering silver barrier keeping the hole sealed, and Wen Zhuliu’s byname was certainly not “Ghost-slayer.” 

By the time she looked back, blood splattered across the room like a macabre painting. The ghost tore strips out of Wen Zhuliu as easily as her contemporaries had done with other Wen cultivators over the last week. The fact that Wen Zhuliu and Wen Chao were still alive was down entirely to how much Wei Wuxian wanted to see them suffer. 

_“Wuya-jie,”_ Wei Wuxian said in a quiet tone, cutting off the earsplitting music. It only took a few bars for Wen Zhuliu to resemble a man mauled by a tiger. He was at least still standing as Wei Wuxian said to Tomoe, _“Still feeling impatient?”_

Tomoe considered the half-formed offer. Wei Wuxian didn’t need her to do anything other than keep an enemy off him while he played his flute and toyed with their lives, if that. And reducing Wen Zhuliu to a carcass bleeding into the floorboards was not something that brought her personal satisfaction. 

Past _that,_ Wen Qing needed certain people intact enough for questions and not one jot more. 

_“No playing,”_ Tomoe replied at last, her right hand still resting on Yukishiro’s hilt. Her limited sentence composition cut down on the complexity of her scolding to almost nothing, even if she had never been the type to lecture even in Nihongo. _“Wasting time.”_

The music resumed, the ghost grinned, and a cloud of resentful energy hurled Wen Zhuliu across the room like a ragdoll until his back hit the window and cracked the struts. Pinned there by both the ghost that had slashed him to ribbons and a new one—also dressed like a bride, but with a prouder face and makeup a century out of date—he was effectively out of the fight with no effort on anyone’s part. Another sharp note from Wei Wuxian caused the wall to shake, then bow outward, and then Wen Zhuliu was abruptly on the outside of the inn and falling. 

Below, ghosts and fierce corpses howled in feral glee as he landed in their midst. 

Tomoe crossed the room in a few short steps to survey the carnage in the courtyard. Even the strongest warrior in the world could be mobbed to death, and if there was one advantage to an undead army, it was that they never had trouble recruiting. The number of ghosts being made was starting to become concerning. 

_“I would have words with my cousin.”_ Wen Qing stepped forward, hands still in her sleeves, and crouched in front of the still-cowering Wen Chao. This put her across the room from Wei Wuxian and within arm’s reach of Tomoe. Probably not the safest place in the world, but Tomeo couldn’t judge. 

Wei Wuxian’s expression eased a little. His qi and the clouds of ghostly smoke did not. _“Go right ahead.”_

Wen Qing’s qi focused entirely on Wen Chao. When she pulled his cloak back, his patchy, torn scalp and wild eyes were his most prominent features. And yet, even with burned hands and ruined composure, Wen Chao’s mauled face twisted in sudden recognition of Wen Qing. 

_“You,”_ Wen Chao hissed. 

_“Where is A-Ning?”_ Wen Qing asked, her voice like a knife made of ice. 

_“Get out of my face! I should have had you sent back to Qishan and strung up—”_

Wei Wuxian tapped his flute against his arm, and the mere sound of the jade ornament hitting his bracer was enough to silence Wen Chao. 

Tomoe glanced toward the ceiling again, impatient, and flipped Yukishiro into her hand. Still sheathed, the thud of the blade against the ceiling was enough to startle all three people on the roof out of their horror and into motion. 

_“What was that for?”_ Wei Wuxian asked her. Either he hadn’t noticed the hole or the barrier, or both. 

Whatever. _“Spectators.”_

At which point the ceiling partly caved in under the simultaneous strikes of one Jiang and one Lan cultivator, slightly too late to be of use in combat. Tomoe just tilted her hat against the falling debris and dust until it settled. All she did was tuck Yukishiro and its sheath back into its slot at her waist.

The fact that she happened to be between them and the scene of horrific carnage out the ruined window was entirely a coincidence. Obviously. 

Shinta’s qi shuffled obediently to the edge of the roof, just above Tomoe’s head. Even with ears as sharp as hers, Tomoe couldn’t hear him until he slipped over the side and swung his way over to the wall. Perched there like some kind of squirrel, he had about three heartbeats to get his bearings before Tomoe grabbed his sleeve and hauled him into the room, _away_ from the sound of tearing fabric and flesh. 

He’d stared at the scene below for a little too long for Tomoe’s comfort. The way Shinta’s qi froze felt too much like fear. 

_“Jiejie, you’re—”_ Shinta’s eyes scanned the room as he recovered from the shock. 

Wei Wuxian stared back, brows raised and eyes a little wide in surprise, but Wen Qing had time for none of them. 

Shinta managed to say into the awkward silence, _“…What did I just walk into?”_

Good question, but not one Tomoe had full answers for. 

Wen Qing had jumped when the ceiling shattered, but only long enough to note the presence of the new additions to the room. Otherwise, she had eyes only only for her interrogation. A teenager in purple—likely the Jiang sect leader, given Shinta’s occasional letters—and one in Lan white were gathered near Wei Wuxian. Crowding him, perhaps, but they didn’t mean actual _harm._

Funny how “harm” was so easily inflicted without intention. 

This close, Tomoe could read their cores and the qi flowing through them like the plainest katakana. 

Concern, love, anger (as a smokescreen), disapproval, relief, and confusion all warred in the air. If Tomoe had to assign them a source, the most negative emotions were _likely_ a reaction to the way Wen Zhuliu had been disposed of, while the positive ones were focused entirely on Wei Wuxian. If they could just express such feelings constructively, they wouldn’t fly loose like this. To Tomoe, the sensation was not unlike being accosted by a swarm of butterflies at an inconvenient moment. 

Still, no one spoke.

All emotion drained from the expression of Tomoe’s flute-wielding companion, but his tiny qi signature was a riot of conflicting impulses smothered by a deep-set hopelessness. Recognition was there, alongside dulled love, gutted rage, and a nasty spike of anxiety. Anticipation crackled in the air between everyone, and Tomoe didn’t even know where to start taking it apart. 

It didn’t get better when Wei Wuxian was handed a sword, or when the Jiang sect leader hugged him. He just stood there, qi fluttering indecisively, while the sharp face of the other young man crumpled under the weight of his feelings. 

Tomoe turned away from _that_ mess and wrapped her arms around Shinta with far less hesitation. Only when she was sure that she’d squeezed the breath out of him—and he did the same to her—did she let go and cradle his face in her hands. 

“Oneesan, I’m fine,” Shinta whispered, as though volume could disguise the unique pattern of Nihongo. The other people in the room must already have been informed. There was no sign of wariness in his stance or his qi compared to before. “What about you? You were gone for three months.” 

“Alive,” Tomoe replied, just as quietly. “At worst, a little tired.” 

“Good,” Shinta said with a sigh of relief. He didn’t really mind her touching his face, but she withdrew her hands anyway. 

Shinta’s qi was steady except where his emotions thrummed, indicating as near to full health as a war would allow. The only thing she could really think to criticize, after a careful examination, was the way he’d let his hair dye grow out without fixing the color. And the fact that he hadn’t actually tied his topknot properly for some time. 

Tomoe solved this by removing her hat and tucking away the panels of flyaway cloth that made up the veil. After a moment’s consideration, she settled it over Shinta’s head with a faint huff of satisfaction. 

“You don’t need to baby me like this,” Shinta complained under his breath. He nudged the hat back over his head so it fell across his shoulders. 

“Three months of nothing.” was Tomoe’s reply. Some of the fussing she did was far harsher, but she’d been holding herself tense like a bowstring for almost the entire separation. The raised voices in the rest of the room were not encouraging her to entirely lower her guard. “Wear it or don’t wear it. It probably doesn’t help now.”

“It’s all right. I know what you meant.” Tomoe heard his smile before she saw it. Unless Tomoe’s eyes played tricks on her. “I promised you I wouldn’t die.” 

“So you did. Well done.” Tomoe would’ve mussed his hair to shut him up, if only she hadn’t just made a point of giving him a hat. It struck her as somewhat incongruous. Even if she tried, now, she could only get his bangs without ruining his excuse for a hairstyle in front of the cultivators. 

Speaking in Nihongo and reuniting with Shinta had eaten almost all of Tomoe’s attention. While multiple conversations in rapid-fire dialects buzzed in her ear, she couldn’t always understand what she heard if she wasn’t focusing. And focus she did not, to her belated annoyance. 

_“If I was thrown into the Burial Mounds,”_ Wei Wuxian’s voice drifted over from a different point in the room—sitting on the table—when Tomoe had the attention to spare for him again, _“do you think I could still be alive and sitting here?”_

Shinta’s eyes flashed with recognition. Tomoe’s qi mirrored it; Wen Qing had mentioned such a place before, in passing, but Tomoe hadn’t had enough space on her tongue to ask that question. Thus, Tomoe jabbed Shinta in the side for an explanation, exactly one finger’s width above his belt. 

_“That’s true,”_ Jiang Something-Or-Other said, a little mollified. _“No one who’s been in there has ever come out alive. Then where did they take you? Yiling or Nightless City? And how did you get out?”_

“He’s a decent liar,” Shinta said out of the corner of his mouth while the younger man spoke, “but not this close to us.” His body language was more tense than Tomoe expected, concerned over what they were hearing, but Tomoe could ask him later. 

Tomoe made a confirmation noise anyway, before deciding it would be a little easier to eavesdrop if she looked busy. She cast one last glance toward the impending argument to note everyone’s positions, then left them to it. 

She arrived to find that Wen Qing hadn’t killed Wen Chao. 

But Wen Chao was cowering again when Tomoe settled on the floor in front of him, her travel robes fanned out in a graceful pool. It was almost as though she was back home, preparing for some grand ceremony, instead of staring down a target who hadn’t the good sense to die before he could be interrogated. Hidden under _his_ traveling robes, the wreckage of his face was at least harder to see. 

Perhaps he’d passed out. It could be something of a mercy. 

_“Did you get what you needed, um, Wen-guniang?”_ Shinta asked, with the briefest hesitation to glance at Tomoe for support. 

_“I did.”_ A little furrow appeared between Wen Qing’s brows as she gave Tomoe’s brother a once-over. _“I doubt we’ve met.”_

 _“Ah, no. You’ve met my sister,”_ Shinta said, kneeling next to Tomoe and pointing at her. _“I’m Wu Tao.”_

Wen Qing’s frown didn’t leave. If anything, it deeped fractionally. _“I was under the impression ‘Wuya-jie’ was some variation of her name. Don’t they have those sounds in Dongying?”_

_“…Jiejie, you never introduced yourself?”_

Tomoe eyed Shinta until he remembered what she’d been doing for most of three months. 

_“Ah,”_ he said. A little abashed, he added to Wen Qing, _“Her name is Wu Xue. At least, you can use that one. She doesn’t…talk much. She has me do it most of the time.”_

Before their separation, at any rate. Most of the people Tomoe had met while missing her translators were very dead now. She hadn’t considered chatting with foes a habit worth cultivating. She hadn’t even spoken three words to Ito Akimitsu before he died. After, it wasn’t like his ghost was going to be a sparkling conversationalist with the woman who murdered him.

 _“Hm,”_ was Wen Qing’s response. 

_“Wen Ning?”_ Tomoe asked, feeling the syllables clash in her mouth. 

_“Not here, obviously,”_ Wen Qing said. Her gazed settled on Wen Chao, disdain plain on her face for only long enough to be recognized. Then her features smoothed out again. _“The last he knew, A-Ning was on his way to Qishan in chains. There’s—I don’t know where he might be, if not there.”_

Tomoe took a careful breath, just a little slower than she normally would. Wen Qing’s fear was all too familiar, and the fact that it took so much effort to shove to one side spoke both of its intensity and Tomoe’s own feelings resonating. The phantom clench in her gut, even with Shinta within arm’s reach, was quite present. The only advantage Tomoe had, in terms of experience, was that she almost always knew _where_ her family was. The answer was just, in almost every case, nowhere but ashes or a shallow grave. 

She set her hand on Shinta’s arm. Trying to find the words, and failing.

 _“Wen-guniang,”_ Shinta said, almost immediately. When Wen Qing turned her attention to him, he asked gently, _“Are you a prisoner?”_

 _“I may as well be,”_ said Wen Qing, brusque. _“But if you’re planning on promising to help me, Wei Wuxian already did. And I don’t intend to make him—or anyone else—simply do me a favor for nothing.”_

_“I wasn’t going to demand anything.”_

_“You might not, but I am of Qishan Wen. And I do actually know how prisoners are generally treated. Or neglected.”_ Wen Qing met Tomoe’s eyes. Each of them had a very good idea how much damage Wei Wuxian’s strange magic could do in a short time. _“It’s better to make myself useful quickly than be left as a war prize at the end.”_

Shinta’s friendly, open face made it that much more obvious when he went still and quiet. Worse, Wen Qing’s words dug into some hollow place Tomoe had rarely seen, even after knowing him for more than five years. _“I know exactly what you mean. I’m—I’m sorry.”_

 _“If you can_ do _something with that apology, I could accept it. As it stands now…”_ Wen Qing fell silent. Exhausted and heartsick. 

Well, this conversation was going nowhere quickly. Worse, it couldn’t be resolved quickly. If the destination Wen Qing had in mind was truly Qishan, but she was a “prisoner” of the Sunshot Campaign, then it could easily be months or years until they found Wen Ning. Assuming they found him alive. 

Tomoe dug around in her qiankun sleeve until she could hand Wen Qing a wrapped bundle of salty rice crackers. 

_“Feeding people doesn’t solve all the world’s problems, Wu Xue,”_ Wen Qing replied. Still, she did accept the food and unwrapped the first one. 

Tomoe waited until Wen Qing made eye contact, then deliberately rolled her eyes.

Wen Qing blinked in surprise and then bit into the cracker to cover that reaction. 

She was nearly certain Wen Qing had been an older sister far longer than Tomoe had been an aunt. Or an older sister herself. Regardless of specifics—Tomoe didn’t know anything about Wen Ning except his name—Wen Qing didn’t strike Tomoe as someone who relied on others. What little Tomoe could do for her involved being as brusque as possible. For her part, Tomoe knew how _she_ reacted to the notion of being pitied, especially by a foe. Appealing to Wen Qing’s sense of pragmatism and preserving what remained of her pride worked far faster than making altruistic overtures. 

_“It can’t hurt, though. Feeding people. Generally looking out for them,”_ Shinta said quietly. He tilted his head toward Tomoe and said in Nihongo, “It’s nice to see you making friends, Oneesan.” 

Tomoe valiantly held back from pinching Shinta to wipe the knowing smile off his face. She was almost certain that he’d been more polite three months ago. Perhaps rescuing those Jiang cultivators back then had been a much-delayed teenage rebellion, and this was the end result. 

Shinta just bumped his shoulder against hers, accepting her prickliness as the cost of being allowed so close. 

_“I’ve heard that you and Shijie are all doing well,”_ Wei Wuxian’s voice drifted back over, audible despite the sound of Wen Qing crunching her way through Tomoe’s offering. _“You’ve been busy rebuilding Yunmeng Jiang and building an army. It must’ve been hard for you for these last three months.”_

Shinta’s gaze flicked toward him and the young sect leader, as though wondering if he was allowed to participate. Wataru would’ve taken the opportunity to throw a joke into the ring for the sake of breaking the tension. Tomoe missed having someone around who could do that. 

“I knew roughly where you were,” Tomoe said, half to stop him from jumping into a conversation between people who, at the least, assumed he didn’t have the social clout to say anything. The other half was genuine curiosity; a wonder of wonders. “What were you doing?” 

“...Fighting, mostly. It was where I could make the most difference.” 

It was about what Tomoe had expected. The new Jiang sect leader didn’t have the luxury of being picky about who he deployed. Otherwise, she expected known foreigners would not have made the list at all during such a strange civil war. Even now, a part of her despaired at the thought of getting still _more_ involved. 

Tomoe could imagine her old teacher’s anger if he ever heard about their participation. Hiten Mitsurugi-ryū granted strength to intervene where needed, yes, but the unchanging Hiko Seijūro despised politics. Too apathetic to hunt her down, but too proud to admit his sole student was breaking every third tenet of their style, he’d have seethed and made enough snide remarks to fuel a decade-long clan war of his own. Getting kicked off a mountain was a light punishment compared to whatever an immortal could’ve dreamed up.

Just as well that Shinta stayed far out of his sight. 

Instead of addressing disobedience in front of a woman branded a traitor to her clan, Tomoe changed the subject with, “Do you think Wataru may be able to help her search? I haven’t been able to get into direct contact with any of his men for some time now.” 

“We can’t know until we ask,” Shinta replied, though he seemed a little cheered by the idea of _something_ he could do. Or at least ask someone else to pursue. Slipping back out of Nihongo, he whispered the possibility to Wen Qing and asked her quiet questions about her brother, because Shinta hadn’t been irrevocably destroyed by jumping headfirst into a war. 

Not yet, anyway. 

If Wen Chao made a single untoward move, Shinta could still slice his hands off before he could touch Wen Qing. 

Meanwhile, the other discussion had progressed to the point where everyone was standing around in a circle crackling with misfired concern, fear, and wordplay used as misdirection. Tomoe had literally stabbed people and caused shallower emotional wounds than whatever was happening over there. It was as though they’d forgotten there was a war to fight not too far from here. What a waste of time. 

The sheer impatience was a surprise when she recognized the depth of it, inspired by dealing with people with other priorities than her own. After so long mostly alone—or with like-minded people—the sensation was fresh. Truly, Tomoe had changed over the last few months. 

Tomoe considered the fact that there was no alcohol in her qiankun pouch or sleeves, and could only sigh. She wasn’t sure if she’d give it to any of these men or drink it herself if she had the choice, but it would be a useful distraction. It was generally better to avoid having emotional arguments while surrounded by corpses, unless one planned to make more.At least the ghost army had already dispersed, taking the corpse of Wen Zhuliu with them as either a snack or a comrade. It probably wouldn’t go over well when they found out which.

In hindsight, perhaps Tomoe oughtn’t have been as calm about the ghost army as she was. It was just that the time to lodge complaints passed a week ago. 

_“It’s been several months since we parted ways at the Xuanwu’s cave.”_ Tomoe had to review that sentence twice to be sure that he was literally talking about the half-mythical turtle in the rumors from months ago. She’d have to ask about it later. Wei Wuxian continued, _“Even if you don’t care for our past camaraderie, you shouldn’t be so ruthless.”_

_“Answer me.”_

They were definitely making negative progress.

“I’m kind of worried now,” Shinta said, his Nihongo drifting under the concern of the cultivators. “They don’t feel like they’re going to fight, but…” 

“If they do, I’m throwing all three of them out that window,” Tomoe said flatly, still listening with half an ear as they started arguing about sharing secrets or going to different places. She could catch one word in five when trying to talk, which mostly just got across the speakers’ sharper speech patterns. “It’d be more productive than this back-and-forth nonsense.” 

“I don’t think you’re going to be able to get away with that once they remember we’re here.”

Tomoe raised one eyebrow in his direction, skeptical.

 _“One of us ought to interrupt,”_ said Wen Qing. Tomoe and Shinta both noticed the way she did not explicitly volunteer for that role, though she was likely the only one who could and not immediately get slapped down for speaking out of turn. _“If only so they can finally decide what to do with my cousin.”_

Luckily, the argument seemed to have devolved a bit before Tomoe developed a stress headache. 

_“Wei Wuxian!”_

_“Lan Wangji.”_

Tomoe tried not to think about bashing their heads together. The temptation grew with time.

“If they were a little bit…less intense,” Shinta said, while the Jiang sect leader tried to redirect the problem toward the greater issue of, say, the rest of the Qishan Wen armies, “I might be able to ignore some of what’s going on over there.” 

Tomoe grunted in agreement. Perhaps she could ward off her impending headache by spreading it around preemptively. 

Wen Qing finally got to her feet, striding into the midst of the three people still maintaining their intense eye contact. _“Jiang-zongzhu, Hanguang-jun. And Wei Wuxian, of course.. As momentous as the occasion is, Wen Chao has been lying on the floor and slowly dying of his wounds for the entire length of this discussion. In the interest of time and efficiency, what do you plan on doing with him?”_

The Jiang sect leader was the first to react. Said something about extracting recompense for the Lotus Pier massacre from Wen Chao’s hide personally. Not that Tomoe didn’t understand the decision, but torture was never her first choice. 

_“Very well.”_ Wen Qing bowed, all intense dignity crammed into her small frame. _“Then I believe it would be best if the rest of us awaited the ruling downstairs. I formally relinquish my claim to punishing him as a member of the Wen clan.”_

Tomoe got to her feet just behind Wen Qing, then stepped deliberately back from Wen Chao. Within arm’s reach, Shinta copied her movements almost exactly. The cultivators would take over from here, and take Wen Chao’s life in the end.

 _“Wu Tao, Wu Xue, escort Wen-guniang out,”_ was what came out of the tense, sharp face of the Jiang sect leader at last.

Tomoe looked toward Shinta for confirmation, mirrored his subordinate bow when he made it, and then bustled out alongside Wen Qing as they left the room. Once they shut the door behind them, the echoing _clack_ of wood on wood was nearly the same as a death knell. The sound of a village’s timekeeping drum would’ve been less obtrusive. 

_Finally,_ freedom from that mess. 

Wen Qing headed down the stairs and took a right turn into the kitchen. Almost immediately, Tomoe heard the sound of someone moving pots and dishes around. 

“Oneesan, Wataru sent me a letter a while ago. I think you’ll want to see it.” Shinta thought that over as soon as he said it, then followed Wen Qing and repeated the idea so she could understand it. The sound of the kitchen being carefully dismantled got louder after that, and it took very little imagining to picture them making more work for any hypothetical inn servants the next day. 

Tomoe focused on that to blot out the rest of whatever the cultivators would do next, drifting after both of them. Kitchen work sounded like a relief.

 _“Tea, I think.”_ Shinta put a hand to his sleeve and withdrew the very end of a compressed tea brick. _“Here, Wen-guniang. Let this servant take care of it.”_

Wen Qing’s eyebrows rose, but she agreed with little prodding. And while Shinta started preparations for boiling water, she said to Tomoe, _“Your brother has better manners than you do.”_

Tomoe nodded. She didn’t say that he also had better tea-brewing skills. 

Wen Qing almost smiled, just at the corner of her mouth, before even that levity faded from her face. 

There was a short, cut-off scream from the upper room—and the Lan boy left on his sword at some point—but it was still one of the less-intense evenings Tomoe had experienced recently. Once the waves of power stopped rolling off the second floor like fog rushing down a mountain, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin (whose name Tomoe finally remembered) trudged down the stairs. 

They found Tomoe, Shinta, and Wen Qing drinking tea around a table in the abandoned kitchen. It wasn’t entirely serene—more realistically five shades of exhausted—but they were all intact. 

_Small blessings,_ Tomoe thought, and let Shinta lean against her side.

* * *

> _To Wu Tao, in the care of Jiang clan of Yunmeng,_
> 
> _Arriving safely in Lanling is more difficult than you’d think, given all the strange men on the roads during this Sunshot Campaign business. I arrived nonetheless, if a bit short on silver and lightly stabbed, and I’ve found a nice little house to settle in long before you even think about joining me. Before you ask, the recovery went swiftly and involved barely any complaining. I think my new neighbors wouldn’t appreciate it._
> 
> _To you, I offer a bit of news: I have a dog now! Well, really, my friend has a dog, but I feed her. If you see a dog with green ribbon and a lovely bronze bell, and a coat the color of roasted chicken, you’ll be able to say you’ve met her. I’m training her to carry messages here and there, since she’s so clever. Try to feed her if you see her. She’ll be friendlier that way. I’ve been calling her Xiaomei, but there’s no chance she answers to it, so good luck!_
> 
> _To your sister, should you see her before I do: With any luck, those outstanding debts will be settled before the year’s end and we will all breathe a little easier. I didn’t think they’d run so far, but I suppose you can’t underestimate gamblers. Their losses are their own fault. There’s nowhere left to run now._
> 
> _At your service as always,_
> 
> _Chen Hao, currently of Lanling_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dog Wataru mentions is Asagi, the ninken partner of Hatake Sakumo's then-sweetheart from _The Canine Warriors_. Here, she's just Inuzuka Satomi, mysterious unseen lady with her hair in a pair of buns (that suspiciously resemble dog ears). The dog is definitely smarter than she seems.
> 
> Tomoe's master is indeed Hiko Seijūro, though he notably isn't the thirteenth master of the style in this continuity; he's the still-living founder and grandmaster. Estimated age: At least two or three centuries and doesn't look a day over thirty. 
> 
> Tea bricks are an actual thing, comprised of compressed tea leaves/powder and binders in order to transport tea over long distances or just store it for a very long time. They're usually not used nowadays, but for large parts of history they were the primary form of tea in the world. They were ubiquitous enough to serve as currency in some parts of the world. Powdered tea is a modern descendant of the stuff. 
> 
> Wen Mao, founder of the Wen clan, had a pretty strict take on what should happen to people who use their clan's power to abuse others: Public beheading, followed by sticking the head on display as a warning to anybody else getting any ideas. Unfortunately, all three of his descendants in the main line during the Sunshot Campaign are basically all wannabe supervillains.


	8. Camouflage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tomoe and Shinta are provided cosplay options that are really mandatory.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A bit of a worldbuilding and bonding.

With four people in a party of sixteen unable to fly under their own power, the trip to Lotus Pier involved a fair amount of walking. Wen Qing’s jian was probably three provinces away, Tomoe and Shinta were both tragically not cultivators, and Wei Wuxian didn’t have enough spiritual energy to fill a teacup. Shinta didn’t particularly mind—he’d gotten places on his own two feet for almost all his life—but it grated on some of the others. Anyone who even looked like complaining got glared into silence by Jiang Wanyin. 

_“Wu-jie isn’t as scary as you made her sound,”_ said Li Jun, who hadn’t been in the building when Tomoe and Wei Wuxian took Wen Zhuliu to pieces. Shinta hadn’t either, but feeling the clash of qi was enough for him to work out what happened. 

_“Why should she be scary right now?”_ Shinta had asked him. As though Tomoe had never scared _him_ in his life. That would be the most bald-faced lie Shinta told—this week. _“We’re friends.”_

_“I’m never going to let you forget you said that. Ever.”_

It was—just maybe—a bit more humanizing than intimidating that Tomoe had hesitated for such a long time to get on a sword with Fang Shufen, even when asked. Shinta hadn’t entirely been sure if her fear was real until, while anxiously surveying the scene, he noticed the way Wei Wuxian winced at the thought of flying. Tomoe was cleverer than Shinta was with qi-sensing and had been around Wei Wuxian longer; if she hadn’t spotted the same problem, it would be a surprise. The resulting impasse stretched long enough for tempers to fray.

In the end, Wei Wuxian had a quick, quiet conversation with Jiang Wanyin—Shinta caught the word _“thrown?!”_ in the latter’s sharp voice—that changed the plan. Shinta’s false name came up in the middle somewhere, too. In the end, most of the group decided to stick to the ground if their sect leader was doing it.

And rode in a small fleet of boats, eventually. Yunmeng was mostly rivers once flight was taken out of the equation. 

Not everyone joined the river adventure, however. Fang Shufen and Hu Yating flew ahead to scout. Though neither of them hugged Wei Wuxian on reuniting with him—unlike both Jiang Wanyin and Li Jun—their relief on recognizing their sect’s head disciple was genuine and almost overwhelming. Universally, the Jiang sect never wanted to let their missing member out of their sight again, but would have to. For a little while. 

_“Glad to have you back,”_ Hu Yating told Wei Wuxian, her river-patterned sword bobbing against her shoulder. _“And for Heavens’ sake, get some sleep. You look like something dredged out of the lotus ponds.”_

 _“I’ve definitely walked out of worse, Fourth Shimei.”_ Wei Wuxian’s smile didn’t quite reach his eyes.

Hu Yating puffed out her cheeks in a mock pout. _“Just because you joined the Jiang sect as an actual child and not a rogue—”_

 _“Get going! You were never as fast a flier as a talker,”_ Wei Wuxian said, tapping her shoulder with his flute. 

_“Coming from you, of all people. The nerve!”_ But she laughed and took off with her sect-sister. 

Shinta slept through about half of the river navigation process, alternating with Tomoe every few hours in a lower-risk version of their sleeping habits during their last days in Nihon. Even on the ship, that habit was too essential to break. Tomoe allowed him to rest his head on her lap, but just curled up under a travel cloak when it was her turn. Every so often, one of the cultivators would glance over curiously, but avoided actually speaking to Tomoe if she was the one awake. 

The fact that Wei Wuxian and Wen Qing also spent much of the journey resting—under Jiang Wanyin’s watchful eye and frankly inhuman endurance—spoke volumes about how hard they’d pushed themselves while chasing Wen Chao. Maybe Wen Qing, in her capacity as a doctor, was the one who had the most authority to order others to rest. She was a prisoner, sure, but Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin still treated her with respect and Tomoe shoved food her way. No one even said anything about binding her hands. 

At the same time, Shinta suspected Jiang Wanyin took the time to look directly into Wei Wuxian’s pale, slightly sunken face and refused to ask any further questions before throwing someone’s blanket at his head. There would be rest or there would be shouting as a direct consequence for refusal.

There was a lot of not-talking going on.

A few hours in, Jiang Wanyin signalled Li Jun to draw his boat back far enough to speak to Shinta. This put the boat steered by Hu Jianhong in the lead. The rest shuffled around without a word, to put the sect leader in the middle of the group instead of drifting along the side of the formation. 

Through the process, his brother and their prisoner dozed in the covered portion. The former still had his flute tucked into his crossed arms. 

Shinta, who was not steering the boat but remained on-hand to give the Jiang cultivator a break, bowed as best he could while staying seated.

 _“We’re staying overnight in the main compound.”_ Jiang Wanyin told him, which was _just_ pitched to avoid waking anyone trying to catch up on sleep. _“What are you going to do?”_

 _“Taking a look at the house, first,”_ Shinta said. By his leg, Tomoe’s qi stirred, but she didn’t move. _“If it’s in the same number of pieces, we’ll stay there? We shouldn’t intrude—”_

 _“And if it’s not, you come to us.”_ Jiang Wanyin’s tone brooked no argument.

Jiang Wanyin had a bad habit of couching concern in annoyance. It was a good thing Shinta’s ability to read his qi from fifty paces cut down on the confusion. 

Tomoe and Shinta broke off from the group when they arrived at the Lotus Cove dock, heading instead for their long-abandoned house along the river, with Jiang Wanyin’s offer ringing in their ears. While the united Sunshot Campaign forces had managed to break the back of the Wen army in Yunmeng, and the Lan group that had departed the other night forced the remnants to abandon Lotus Pier compound, the Jiang sect hadn’t recovered enough to occupy it themselves. But Jiang Wanyin and Wei Wuxian needed to make sure the ancestral shrine survived, and so everyone else went along with them, as though afraid to lose track of the two.

Wen Qing was probably going to be left in the entry hall and asked politely not to move around much without an escort.

 _“I’m a little surprised the house is still standing empty,”_ Shinta said under his breath as they arrived at the front gate. Without Wataru’s (localized) name on a bill of sale, no one would have legally moved in until a magistrate ruled one way or another. It was just that the cultivation sects were, in many ways, the ones who mostly fulfilled that role in their home regions. _“How many people left after the Wen attacked?”_

Tomoe pushed the gate open and walked into the yard without answering. 

It wasn’t so bad. Unlike some other homes, it had never been burned. There were a few signs of someone tossing the place—windows open to the elements, wreckage of the small statues that had come with the house, a Wen icon here or there and so on. The gingko tree’s leaves were worse than snow and left strange stains when they rotted in place, but the yard was always going to require more work. Shinta picked through tools accidentally left outdoors for a season and found a molded broom. The rake was in a similarly sad state, and somehow a washbasin had been shattered against a wall. 

Shinta scratched the back of his neck. After last glance at the yard, he entered the house after her. 

Tomoe’s voice drifted down the stairs. “I found your hair coloring.” 

Shinta grimaced where Tomoe couldn’t see him. _Great._

“No one took your sewing projects.” Tomoe arrived in the kitchen with a large bundle, half-dismantled robes and trailing thread peeking out of the top. “Our spare robes are long gone, though.” 

“That’s not so bad. I brought most of my best ones with me.” Shinta’s mouth twisted unhappily as he assessed the mess of broken crockery and bent cooking vessels left behind by whoever had wrecked their temporary home. “And a couple of my finished reworks.” 

People with steady incomes, such as Wen cultivators, could afford any arrangement of cotton or silk they ever wanted. Shinta hadn’t even _glimpsed_ silk until he was thirteen. All of his experience with sashiko, boro, and sakioki work was too distinctly from Nihon to use here, but he’d been learning since their arrival. Tearing the hems and fitting out of used robes was much more discreet, and more time-consuming than challenging. The fact that the Wen had stolen even the plain, modest robes of a Yunmeng household was either a sign of their greed or just terrible luck. 

Shinta grabbed the inside broom and started sweeping the floor to keep his hands busy. He tried not to listen much as Tomoe packed his things into her mostly-empty qiankun pouch. 

“Do we have any bedding?” Shinta asked. 

“No. There were rats.” 

Assuming they still lived here after the Sunshot Campaign was over, Shinta was going to bribe some of the local cats into patrolling. He should’ve thought of it before, but they’d left in a rush. They wouldn’t have left so many things to be stolen otherwise. 

“I guess we’re staying with the Jiang clan.” Shinta continued clearing the debris and closing up the house like they hadn’t successfully done before. Then: “Oneesan?” 

Tomoe looked up from the qiankun pouch on the table. 

“When you met Wei Wuxian, did you know he was the Jiang sect’s missing first disciple?”

Tomoe raised an eyebrow. “We didn’t exchange names at the time.” 

Shinta blew a loose lock of hair out of his face, fallen out of his topknot. “And he wasn’t giving any hints…?” 

“No.” She didn’t seem to be in much of a mood for talking about that. Maybe Shinta would be able to wrangle the full story later from Wei Wuxian or Wen Qing, but for now Tomoe only commented, “Someone stole my good hairpins and the board Wataru made.” 

And apparently anything they didn’t steal or eat, the occupiers in this house had smashed. A game board was, somehow, important enough to just take.

Maybe some Wens had treated the house like an informal barracks, but that would’ve only been necessary in the first place due to the damage they did to Lotus Pier. The Jiang clan’s compound was more than large enough to count as its own half-floating village. 

The idea of losing their igo board—he’d have to remember to call it weiqi outside of the house—was just another detail in a sea of them, but it was still a surprise. Any food Shinta left behind during his departure would’ve rotted by now, and there definitely _had_ been rice stored somewhere. Pickles of various kinds and dried meat, too. Those were expected losses, which would have ruined families without backup plans or hidden wealth. Any money they didn’t take with them was long gone, as was any scrap of jewelry or ornamentation. But the board?

So Shinta muttered, “Why would anyone _have_ to? Can’t people afford better sets in any big city?” 

Tomoe sighed and moved ahead with tying the qiankun bags shut. “It’s what armies do. Better for soldiers to lose an evening playing games than causing havoc.”

It wasn’t as though they had miraculously stumbled across a better way to carve wood than what the locals could do. Or to make the stones. Wataru just liked destroying Shinta with an army of little black and white game pieces, and Shinta kept agreeing to games he inevitably lost because it helped fill their evenings. The matches between Tomoe and Wataru were actual _battles,_ even if she’d eventually stopped playing during their time in Yunmeng.

They worked in silence as the sun traced its slow path across the sky. In what felt like no time at all, the light took on a yellowish afternoon cast and streamed through the open back door. Dust motes danced everywhere, no matter how many times Shinta swept old ash from the kitchen or dust from the rooms. 

“I think we’ve done what we can.” Tomoe strung the qiankun pouch from her belt again. “Let’s go.” 

Shinta drew a slow breath, wrapped up what he could, and accompanied Tomoe to Lotus Pier for the night.

Not everyone who’d lived and worked in Lotus Pier had died. While the ruling family and the sect itself were drastically reduced, servants and family members of some of the disciples survived. The Wen sect merely installed themselves as the new overlords of what unburned parts of the Jiang sect’s compound remained, lording over the servants who clung to their employment by cultivators. And the support staff waited, and worked, and greeted their young masters’ return as though they were triumphant generals in a recent war.

No sudden victory peeked over the next tree or the next lake, but defeat could arrive from any quarter. Including a failure to manage the home front.

Maybe it hadn’t just been the Lan sect who’d chased the remaining Wen here away. Normal people could get as sick of tyrants as anyone. They just usually had less recourse than people who led armies, even if peasants made up most of the foot soldiers Shinta had ever met. This was less the case with cultivation sects; a mundane army could press anyone into service if they could hold a spear and a line, but cultivators were each decades of investment in the making. 

It was a long way of saying that Shinta wasn’t all that surprised, in hindsight, when Jiang Wanyin followed up welcoming them to the place with a rather specific concern.

 _“How are you planning on hiding being from Dongying?”_ Jiang Wanyin twisted his ring around on his finger as he spoke. It was a nervous habit restrained only by the way Zidian also formed a linked bracelet, and it made _other_ people less nervous than when the spiritual tool started dripping purple sparks. 

_“People mostly just assume we’re not.”_ This far into the empire, who was on the lookout for foreigners masquerading as neighbors? _“I’ve never thought we could pass for noble cultivators or rich merchants, or anything like that. We’re just unimportant enough that everyone’s eyes just don’t focus on us.”_

 _“That’s going to change,”_ Jiang Wanyin said. His customary frown deepened, though Shinta didn’t judge him for it. His brother had just returned from the Burial Mounds and a Tomoe-led murder spree, and was sleeping like the dead in his own room. _“You won’t be able to hide in our shadow forever.”_

Shinta met Jiang Wanyin’s eyes, steadied his qi, and said plainly, _“Almost all of your disciples already know about me and about Jiejie. Are you offering something different, Jiang-zongzhu?”_

Jiang Wanyin grimaced. When he made a face like that, it was hard for Shinta to remember that Jiang Wanyin was only eighteen. If not for the way Shinta had been shoved through his genpuku ceremony early, neither of them would’ve been adults by their cultures’ standards. 

Well. Shinta would _now,_ but only through surviving to see twenty years. 

_“Dress like a Jiang disciple, even if you have to take something sized for juniors. We have enough to repay you for lending your assistance.”_ Jiang Wanyin waved a hand to encompass both Shinta and Tomoe, who was still standing right there and waiting for an actual conclusion to the conversation. _“No one will ask where either of you came from.”_

 _“I can sew, actually.”_ Shinta bowed. Next to him, Tomoe copied his movements. _“Thank you, Jiang-zongzhu.”_

_“Stop bowing and get to work! I can’t have you running around in those rags forever!”_

* * *

_“Wait, you’re Wuya-jie’s adorable didi?”_ Wei Wuxian asked the next day, after rising sometime just short of noon. He tapped his flute against his arm as he leaned forward, thoughtful, and then a smile quirked at the corners of his mouth. _"You're all cute and sweet with your didi, but you bully me all the time? How is this fair?"_

Tomoe, who had been carefully piling Shinta’s hair into a high knot with the help of a comb and a borrowed ribbon, reached past her brother and shut the window in Wei Wuxian’s face. 

“I don’t think you’re allowed to do that, Oneesan.” 

“Watch me.” 

From outside, Wei Wuxian’s voice shouted, _“This is exactly what I was talking about!”_

Tomoe declined to answer, but noted the path Wei Wuxian took around the outside of the compound, whistling loudly. He faded from her view faster than any cultivator. Figuring he’d be back around in a short while and show up at their door, Tomoe fixed the rest of their Jiang sect disguises in record time. There had yet to be a day—and might never—where Tomoe thought of this Wu Xue identity as _her._

“No time to dye it,” Tomoe muttered, standing back to survey her work. “Still, this should do.” 

Shinta noticeably bit the inside of his cheek to keep from commenting. While Shinta remained the most skilled with a needle out of their little cohort, Tomoe was by far the better at arranging hair and had managed to perfectly ape the strict, half-up style favored by most members of the Jiang sect. Though the blue-teal-purple combination made Shinta’s odd hair color stand out all the more by clashing, he _did_ look like a Jiang disciple. His somewhat sour expression even resembled Jiang Wanyin’s. 

“And you?” Shinta asked dryly.

Tomoe said in a matching tone, “I look like someone’s handmaiden.” 

Tomoe’s robes were a bright lilac that fell just short of the white layer underneath, and both left her close-toed cloth boots exposed. Her hair was tightly bound in a high, braided bun that contained two needle-sharp hairpins and a comb to control everything. Because they were accessorized with deeper purple-on-wisteria for a belt and white forearm ties, Tomoe was _not_ looking forward to the first fight in this new outfit that inevitably ruined them forever with bloodstains. Most of the Sunshot Campaign was going to involve fighting _people,_ after all. 

At least she had backups. Her now-clean black outer robe made a decent second option, especially when paired with red. It was just a pity Wei Wuxian had effectively claimed the color combination for personal use. 

“It might make it easier for you to make friends?” Shinta suggested at last, in the exact voice of someone whose optimism verged on desperation.

Tomoe had roughly one-third of the skills necessary to run a modest-sized household, with Shinta and Wataru making up for what she lacked. Approachability and friendliness were not among her more noteworthy traits. The resulting skepticism undoubtedly showed in Tomoe’s qi despite her control over her expression. 

Shinta looked away, unable to argue. 

And that was when Wei Wuxian completed the inevitable circuit of Lotus Pier’s guest wing and started pounding on the door. _“What is taking you so long?”_

Shinta opened it before Wei Wuxian could swing again, and nearly took a fist to his face. Unblinking, Shinta said, _“Wei-gongzi. Are we late?”_

 _“Probably.”_ Wei Wuxian shrugged. He stood back so Tomoe and Shinta could leave the room, sizing them up. He still wasn’t wearing the greedy, spiritually-active jian, but he spun his flute in his fingers. _“You look like regular Jiang sect disciples! A brand-new shimei and shidi, perfectly balanced.”_

With the fluidity of a rockfall, Tomoe said, _“No.”_

_“Oh? Why not?”_

Shinta stepped in before Tomoe was obligated to shoulder-check Wei Wuxian over a railing and into the nearest lotus pond. _“Because I think both of us are older than you.”_

 _“It’s not about birth order. It’s about who joined the sect first, especially for outer disciples,”_ Wei Wuxian told them, leading the way through Lotus Pier and toward the gates. They passed servants hard at work removing bloodstains, who all bowed to Wei Wuxian as they went. _“Or are you both such strong cultivators that you’re somehow my tiny shishu and shigu?”_

It took Tomoe a second to translate the terms as “martial uncle” and “martial aunt.” She wrinkled her nose just a bit. 

Her objection had less to do with age than cold reality. Jiang Wanyin needed people who could cause damage out of proportion with the cost of deploying them. While Tomoe allowed Shinta to debrief her on the months of progress he and the Jiang sect had made—such as recruiting heavily from other, half-destroyed sects and from the Meishan Yu for more expertise—her natural cynicism kept any praise for his efforts trapped behind her teeth. 

It wouldn’t be out of character for local nobility to use people like them as assassins. The surprise was Shinta’s certainty that Jiang Wanyin intended to keep them around long-term. 

_“Not cultivators at all,”_ Shinta said, peering at Wei Wuxian curiously for his reaction. As a sect’s guest disciple, Shinta was allowed to wear his sword openly, so he rested his left arm on it where it hung from his hip. _“But it doesn’t really matter. We’re still going to do our part.”_

 _Whatever that means now,_ Tomoe avoided saying.

Wei Wuxian’s weak qi clenched as soon as Shinta finished his first sentence. Tomoe didn’t have enough context to deduce the reason, and definitely didn’t have the linguistic fluidity. Still, she caught a quick flicker of Shinta’s spiritual energy that let her known he’d spotted it too. As such, she noted the reaction for later and decided to change the topic. 

_“Twenty-four.”_ Tomoe’s interjection came out a little uncertain of her syllables, but she still pointed at Shinta and said, _“Twenty.”_

Wei Wuxian recovered faster by leaping on the new subject than he ever would have otherwise. _“So that makes you Wuya-jie and Wuya-ge.”_

 _“Wei-gongzi, I think that might draw a little too much attention our way,”_ Shinta suggested, looking at Tomoe out of the corner of his eye. 

_“There’s nothing wrong with a little notoriety.”_

_“In moderation,”_ Shinta allowed. He let the sentence lie as they walked, then said, _“Wei-gongzi, I saw some of your talisman work while you were attacking those Wen cultivators.”_

Wei Wuxian’s smile, once again, failed to reach his eyes. _“And?”_

 _“You clearly know how to break protections,”_ Shinta said patiently, not acknowledging the defensiveness both of them clearly saw. _“Do you know how to make better ones? And if you do, do you think you could teach us?”_

At the same moment Tomoe shot Shinta a brief glare for speaking for both of them.

_“That’s going to be difficult if neither of you can read.”_

_“Jiejie’s well-read,”_ Shinta protested.

In another country’s poetry. Tomoe hadn’t read much of anything since stepping off the ship. The fact that she could read imported books didn’t help her talk to people, either; the written and spoken form of formal court language from two hundred years ago could only be so useful. 

Shinta’s standards were simply even lower.

 _“Wuya-jie asked me to translate Wen battle reports for her an hour after we first met.”_ Wei Wuxian glanced at her and added cheerfully, _“You were the most persistent stalker I’ve ever had. Besides all the actual birds.”_

Tomoe pretended not to hear him. And not to notice the amusement in Shinta’s expression. 

There was little chance of any of them _avoiding_ the attention of the various sects involved in the Sunshot Campaign. Even if Tomoe had dismissed Jiang Wanyin’s offer and simply disappeared into Yunmeng with her brother unhappily in tow, they were _known._ Wataru remained hidden solely because Li Jun could keep a secret when ordered to do so. He avoided attention from the larger world and would not break cover for useless heroics. Tomoe gave up that chance the moment she raised her sword to defend her brother’s choices. 

Controlling the story from this point forward was all anyone could do.

Tomoe kept walking, skirting neatly around workers, servants, and young disciples who had begun to repair and repopulate Lotus Pier. Someone had already gathered the swords and sect bells of slain cultivators and started the process of expanding the memorial hall for them. People talked and Tomoe listened, over and over again. The mental strain of comprehension was lower now, even if producing words of her own remained difficult. 

There was something to be said for total immersion.

 _“Wait for us, Jiejie,”_ Shinta called as Tomoe picked up the pace. 

Tomoe’s gaze caught on the signs of long-extinguished fire and dried blood on wood and stone, then skittered off just as quickly. With the reconstruction efforts underway, no hour of daylight passed without the sound of people hard at work. Still, months—if not years—lay ahead of them. Jiang Wanyin’s future contained tireless rebuilding as far as the eye could see.

Not something Tomoe had much experience with. Her branch of her clan was too far gone. 

Jiang Wanyin awaited them at the gate, alongside the ranks of cultivators he’d accumulated through months of hard work. There was enough purple dye in their uniforms alone to break the budget of many households Tomoe had seen. Even while Shinta passed her to join their ranks and Wei Wuxian shouted a mutual greeting with his sect leader, Tomoe closed her eyes for a few seconds to steady herself. 

If not for Shinta’s account of his many journeys as a passenger as the Jiang sect flew, Tomoe would’ve tried to get out of this. She had no more interest in flying now than she had a year ago. The closest she’d experienced involved _falling,_ and there was a deep-seated rejection of putting her safety in the hands of people she didn’t know.

 _“It’s not that bad,”_ said Fang Shufen, who watched Tomoe’s indecisiveness with minimal contempt. _“But Wu Tao was the same way when we started. Did he tell you we had to carry him like a goat to market? And look at him now.”_

Shinta chatted amiably with Li Jun a few paces away, more relaxed than he’d been during his first ride on horseback. A little past them, Wei Wuxian and Jiang Wanyin argued in hushed tones with neither of their swords drawn. Bringing up the rear, Wen Qing was almost perfectly camouflaged among the Jiang disciples in the same robes Tomoe wore, though everyone knew there was Wen red somewhere in _someone’s_ qiankun pouch. 

It was just that none of them showed the same stab of fear Tomoe felt. Despising weakness in herself didn’t make it go away.

 _“Sorry,”_ Tomoe said to Fang Shufen, though she didn’t mean precisely that. There was no use in apologizing for fear; only for the effect her reaction had on others. In this case, that meant just the momentary delay. _“New.”_

Fang Shufen nodded, then her gaze flicked past Tomoe. _“Jiang-zongzhu?”_

Tomoe eyed Jiang Wanyin as he broke off from his argument to say to Shinta, _“Your dao.”_

Shinta held it out, because he couldn’t see a specific reason not to and was in fact a pushover. Jiang Wanyin already knew (some of) the details of Shinta’s origins, and so did the cultivators all around them. And unlike cultivator jian, Shinta’s nameless katana wouldn’t bite or reject hands other than his. 

_“We’d have to see if a bladesmith still has the space or the time,”_ Jiang Wanyin said, half to himself. He stared down at the katana as though he could unlock the secrets of metallurgy through sheer force of will. He didn’t quite reach out to touch it, but he did say, _“You need a proper finish for these. Both of you still stand out too much.”_

In Tomoe’s opinion, the somewhat-stained cotton over sharkskin didn’t stand out _so_ badly. Tomoe could change the distinct braid pattern easily enough when she had some time and a new cord. It was just everything else that was wrong. 

Katana were elegantly unadorned when compared to jian and dao wielded by mainlanders with money. Many cultivators preferred ornamental wooden hilts, wrapped in leather and decorated with every metal under the sun. Even Wei Wuxian’s relatively plain blade (with no crossguard) had silvery vines running down the wood. Out of the two katana here, only Tomoe’s Yukishiro had a proud carving of cranes in snow on the pommel. Shinta’s was almost entirely blank. Probably for the best in Nihon, where most ashigaru eschewed decoration when there was higher turnover in both weapons and men, but just one more detail that made it harder to hide here.

Though the sheer distinctiveness of each jian made them somewhat easier to pick out of a crowd. Tomoe had a better memory for new swords than new faces.

All of this sprang to mind in a few heartbeats, simply because Jiang Wanyin was incapable of expressing gratitude—or recruiting people to his sect—without finding the most backhanded method of phrasing it.

And Tomoe made this judgement even as someone who was no better. 

_“That’s very generous, Jiang-zongzhu,”_ Shinta said, bowing deeply. It lasted just long enough for Jiang Wanyin to start looking uncomfortable, and then Shinta continued, _“For now, I cannot accept your offer. This dao is best put to use as quickly as possible.”_

Jiang Wanyin briefly glanced at Tomoe, as though expecting her to convince Shinta to change his mind. When that appeal failed before it could even begin, he turned to the remainder of his forces and yelled at them to get in the air already. 

Tomoe sighed and climbed onto the offered sword without a further word. That could be left firmly to Shinta for now. 

Fang Shufen took the time to show her where to place her hands, then added, _“By the way, I might ask you to move to Hu Yating’s sword in a few hours. How to do you feel about midair transfers?”_

Unfortunately, Tomoe wasn’t able to compose a response before all of them were already in the air and headed for Qinghe. 

Seeing the world spin away below them just reminded her, again and again, of seeing falcons knock other birds from the sky. Of falling from cliffs. Her ability to recover from long falls had _limits._ Much more stringent limits than cultivators seemed to care about. 

Her fingers clenched in Fang Shufen’s robes like claws, and her heartbeat refused to obey her otherwise iron control. 

It was a very, very long flight. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Go/Igo is a strategic game involving black and white stones that originated in China about 3,000 years ago under the name "Weiqi." In _Rurouni Kenshin_ , Kenshin and Sanosuke play shogi while waiting for the assassin Kurogasa to show up early in the manga, so at least some of these people are inclined toward board games.  
> "Ashigaru" refers to foot-soldiers employed by daimyō armies, who can be either mercenaries or conscripts depending on the era. Historically, the glory days of ashigaru were during the chaos of the Sengoku Jidai, because they could be deployed en masse with early firearms.  
> As a reminder, "Dongying" and "Nihon" both refer to Japan, from different languages. "Nihonjin" are Japanese people, while "Nihongo" is the language.  
> Historically, China had a decreed monopoly on the production of silk until Koreans ended up with the technology in the 200s BC. India has had silk for about as long, but obviously never fell under the Chinese emperor's control. As for Europe, that's down to a Byzantine heist in the 500s AD. Silk usage in Japan was much more strictly stratified by social class, meaning Tomoe would be very familiar with the material and Shinta wouldn't had been.


	9. Haunting

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wei Wuxian discovers a bit more than he bargains for when bothering Tomoe during archery practice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Those of you who're already familiar with Tomoe's backstory probably have a pretty good idea of what's coming up. 
> 
> Content warnings for this chapter: (book) canon-typical violence, primarily blood and description of mostly-lethal injuries. Also includes references to Wei Wuxian's experiences in the Burial Mounds and the immediate aftermath of the fall of Lotus Pier.

The Unclean Realm hosted the bulk of commanders for the ongoing war, partially because Qinghe Nie’s sect leader was still the highest-ranked of them and partly due to proximity to Qishan. The smaller sects who joined the campaign paid attention to power and influence, and with Lanling Jin’s sect leader still avoiding full commitment, and two of the other great sects effectively led by people shoved into the role after the deaths of all who came before, there wasn’t much argument about it. Overall, this meant the landlocked and relatively militaristic Qinghe Nie were playing host to _everyone._

Including walking wounded.

The field hospital stretched across two courtyards, with healers receiving new patients from sunrise to sunset and back again. While the bulk of the sects’ numbers were comprised of cultivators, rich families brought a secondary army of supporters along. Healers were the most valued of them, but hundreds of people worked in every arena from washing and repairing robes to cooking to drawing talismans for later use. Shinta explained this even when they took breaks during the flight to Qinghe, whispering to her as the cultivators around them stretched their stiff joints in preparation for the next leg of the journey.

Tomoe spent her first day among the army recovering from airsickness, of all things. She avoided the field hospital by tucking herself away into the Jiang sect’s quarters and not moving until sunset. Nausea and humiliation were the kind of combination that made her temper unfit for existing civilly near anyone, so she stayed well out of the way of the day’s events. 

Her only visitor was Shinta, who spoke in a low murmur while attending to her. 

Shinta, who knew field medicine only through experience and not study, mostly fetched and carried when it was his turn to help over the last month or so. He learned from healers where he could—mostly while patients groaned barely an arm’s reach away—and put himself to work while the various clan heads talked strategy. Short a noble bloodline and wealth, Shinta was not invited to those meetings. He heard about what was decided later. 

Through the power of his earnestness, perhaps, this gave Shinta access to medicine Tomoe’s pride never allowed her to request.

Aside from his worth as a pair of hands when the healers needed them, stitching torn clothes back together, and following Jiang Wanyin on every other strike against the Wen periphery, Shinta mostly just tried to stay busy. When he couldn’t search for Tomoe and was excluded from any cultivator exercises that required a golden core, it was enough to work until he slept like a stone at night.

Continuing such practices meant on the second dawn in Qinghe, Tomoe left their shared quarters without waking him. 

The Jiang sect was happy enough to lend her a bow and enough arrows to practice, though it took Tomoe almost the entire walk across the compound to rehearse the sentences she wanted. Fang Shufen even went so far as to escort Tomoe to the archery field personally, though the sun barely peeked over the mountains. 

_“Shout if you need anything,”_ Fang Shufen told her before bustling away. 

Tomoe put on her bracers and chest guard, made sure she’d tied all of her hair into a controllable knot, and began her first practice session with any ranged weapon in years. 

It showed. 

Kyūdō was possibly the least forgiving of any weapon discipline Tomoe ever practiced. There was no recourse or trick to assist those who neglected their skills. 

_Draw with the breath._

Worse, the bow in her hands wasn’t a yumi at all. All of the Jiang bows varied a little in their construction, but were all composites of wood, buffalo horn, and animal sinew under all the ornamental carvings, and they were the same length above and below the handle. Yumi were almost half again as long on the top, forcing the wielder into an entirely different draw technique. Tomoe’s muscle memory kept leading her astray. 

_Release with the breath._

The dozen missed shots and twice as many failures to strike a single dyed ring was all she had to show for her efforts. 

She _used_ to be a good archer. Not the best in the family—that had been a contest confined to her second-oldest brother Takahiro and her cousin Toshiro—but she’d started so much later. Anyone, Tomoe thought, could’ve become the best mounted archer in the family with the decade of seniority they had over her. Tomoe merely had the disadvantage of being born as the last child of her generation, while still judged by that standard. 

Muscles along her shoulders, back, and chest all protested at being forced back into proper condition over the hours she spent under the Qinghe morning mist. Her fingers stung from the shot that grazed her left hand, though she’d barely drawn halfway to the bow’s limit. The red mark on her thumb wouldn’t fade quickly. 

_Thwip._

Even so, archery was meditative. The skills she practiced more consistently—such as kenjutsu, stealth, etiquette, housekeeping, and board games—either confronted her with a less-tangible goal or were uncomfortable to practice in Qinghe. A painted ring taunted her immediately and presented a measurable metric for success. She either shot accurately or failed. 

_Thwip._

Maybe Tomoe needed to go back to basics with this skill. Reteach herself from nothing at all, or teach someone else. The days spent guiding Shinta through her kenjutsu techniques forced her to think about the movements in a more granular fashion, improving her own skills as he developed into a sparring partner. Perhaps she needed competition, too. 

Most of the Jiang cultivators outpaced her. Tomoe had emptied her quiver several times and earned no bullseyes to show for it. Who would even view _this_ as a competition?

_Thwip._

_“There you are, Wuya-jie,”_ called a familiar voice.

While she turned and bowed to acknowledge Wei Wuxian as he arrived, her mind weighed the numbers and concluded that her work here was a disappointment. In her distraction, it took her a moment to remember which arm orientation to use, and grimaced internally when she realized she’d placed the wrong hand forward for a martial bow anyway. It was always difficult to remember which of the etiquette lessons was correct and which was an implied death threat. 

Going by the gleam in Wei Wuxian’s eye, it was difficult to tell if he caught the mistake or just found her archery failures amusing. Once again, he walked without any weapon other than his flute, his wits, and the occasional wisp of shadowy energy that crept along behind him. No walking corpses today, it seemed. It was just the aura of a gravetender that served as his escort. 

_“Wei-gongzi,”_ Tomoe rasped, after an entire morning of barely speaking.

 _“Shixiong,”_ Wei Wuxian suggested, with a grin that failed to cover his fatigue. His qi felt like sludge at the bottom of a river. _“Or maybe Wei-xiong?”_

 _“What. Do you. Want,”_ Tomoe bit out, picking and choosing her words like a shogi player placing tiles. 

_“Nothing so serious, so you can stop scowling.”_ Wei Wuxian swayed on his feet, his hair and his flute’s tassel swinging cheerfully in the morning light. _“I just wanted to talk to you about a few things while there aren’t any curious ears around. No Lan Zhan or Jiang Cheng, or any Wuya-ge with the big sad eyes like he’s been sporting since we landed. I’m glad you’re feeling better, by the way, though I could’ve delivered my well-wishes yesterday if you’d taken any visitors.”_

Tomoe bit back a sigh, because Wei Wuxian still spoke entirely too fast for her to build a sentence while listening to his. She waited until he paused to take a breath, then ordered, _“Talk.”_

He didn’t start immediately, because Wei Wuxian wove his way around even his peers when he spoke. Instead, Wei Wuxian sat on a nearby bench—normally used for observers and instructors of the Nie sect’s archers—slouching as though he’d never been taught to sit properly in his life. He tucked one leg over the other and leaned forward, twirling Chenqing in his fingers. 

_“Wuya-jie, you don’t care about my…”_ He wiggled the flute again. _“Alternative path. I was wondering why that was.”_

As a statement, it required no response.

Fighting the urge to roll her eyes at the thought of yet another day of being Wei Wuxian’s near-silent counsel—or echo chamber—for whatever strange thought came to mind, Tomoe lifted her bow again and turned toward the target.

_Draw with the breath._

_“I’m sure your ears are just as sharp even if your face is turned away.”_

Still not a question. Tomoe kept her gaze trained forward. 

_Release with the breath._

The arrow slammed into the third ring, a hair’s breadth closer than her best shot beforehand. 

_“Then I’ll just keep going, shall I?”_ Without waiting for a response that would be slow off the mark regardless, he went on, _“The reason you’re not worried about my cultivation path is because yours is half a step into the dark already.”_

Tomoe turned that term—“yin” when it hit her ears—over in her mind for twice as long as the rest of Wei Wuxian’s excessive explanation. Or accusation, perhaps. As clever as Wei Wuxian thought he was, he made assumptions frequently while speaking with most people. Here, he assumed Tomoe knew anything about what kinds of qi usage formed a basis for cultivation. As someone who never intended to form a golden core and wouldn’t know where to start, Tomoe likely understood less than a third of such technicalities when they were explained. 

In this case, it was less a language issue—though that was still present—and more a gap in education in esoteric topics. Tomoe would have had the same problem if asked how to train people to kill bakemono back home. 

_“First, liberate; second, suppress; third, eliminate,”_ Wei Wuxian rattled off, as though that sufficed as an explanation. _“If you listen to any orthodox cultivator, those are the only ways to deal with resentful spirits and their energy. But your dao does only one of those things at all, and a fourth much, much better.”_

_Draw._

_Release._

_“Explain,”_ Tomoe said, trying to suit the word to the whole of the question she couldn’t quite form. She lowered her bow to a resting position and turned her face toward Wei Wuxian, even dropping her shoulders to indicate a fraction less hostility in her statement. 

Just next to Wei Wuxian’s knee, Tomoe’s outermost lilac robe sat on the bench under the sheathed Yukishiro. She’d removed both due to the accumulation of sweat between her shoulder blades and her katana’s relative uselessness in this exercise. One of Wei Wuxian’s half-visible shadows shuffled toward Yukishiro as she watched, only to quail and disappear under her glare. Whatever strange power he carried could keep its coils to itself. 

_“Your dao here,”_ Wei Wuxian said, pointing at Yukishiro, _“is steeped in the regret and resentment of every ordinary person you’ve killed with it. Dozens, at least.”_ Wei Wuxian met her eyes squarely. _“Cultivators have soul-calming ceremonies so they don’t leave ghosts behind, but many of these people weren’t cultivators. Until I saw Wu Tao’s dao in action, I thought it might be normal for Dongying. But is it?”_

Tomoe stared at Yukishiro without taking her actual attention off Wei Wuxian, trying to put enough words together to respond. Enough time passed that Wei Wuxian started to fidget, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, and had twirled Chenqing another ten times. 

Finally, she said haltingly, _“Didi is gentle.”_ The only way to remove a weakness was to train to compensate, but this was worse than any slump she’d experienced with the gentler arts. The tone was probably wrong despite her best efforts, too, but Wei Wuxian was almost used to her tongue tripping up by now. He’d had enough time to adapt. If he didn’t, it reinforced the need for practice. _“Revenge is…mine. Only.”_

Wei Wuxian’s “carefree” fiddling with Chenqing developed a hitch, almost sending the flute to the ground. Someone less perceptive than Tomoe wouldn’t have caught the hesitation at all and assumed he was just careless. 

_“So, you’re using human resentment and leftover emotions of your victims to fuel your sword. How does that make you any different from me?”_ Wei Wuxian mused. He crossed his arms, flute tucked between them. 

Tomoe met Wei Wuxian’s eyes squarely, tilting her head slowly to one side as the staring contest continued.

 _“Nothing to say?”_

Tomoe crossed the distance between them, leaning forward slightly as she came to a stop. She could only loom like this when he was sitting down, but Wei Wuxian met her gaze with a grin. The grin dropped when Tomoe plucked Yukishiro from the bench, still in its sheath, and Wei Wuxian’s expression shifted toward consideration. 

_“Wuya-jie?”_

Holding the blade by the sheath, she channeled her spiritual energy into the blade with enough force to trigger the blade’s attention. Focusing her qi carefully, she rested her thumb against the tsuba and made as though to draw it left-handed. Yukishiro trembled against her fingers with agitation, roused as though for combat. 

Then she dropped Yukishiro into Wei Wuxian’s hands. 

_“Ask,”_ Tomoe said, and turned back to the archery range. _“Easier to call spirits.”_

She’d already fired her first shot by the time Wei Wuxian bowed his head over Yukishiro, contemplative. She blocked out whatever he wanted to say; until he made his bid to talk to Yukishiro, further conversation would be a waste of breath.

_Draw with the breath._

* * *

Wei Wuxian blinked up at Wuya-jie, more surprised than confused. While she was one of the more reticent people he’d ever met, barring Lan Wangji, the worst of her reluctance to speak or share anything about herself was always something he’d assumed came down to her lack of education. Lack of a clever tongue. Giving her Suibian would never have occurred to him—even if he didn’t leave it in his rooms for being a painful reminder—and yet she’d dropped the dao in his lap as though it meant nothing.

That was…not how a cultivator thought.

“I’m not sure that a dao can store the answers to as many questions as I can think of,” Wei Wuxian told her. Unless the blade was harboring something that could. He tucked Chenqing into his sash so he could use both hands. “Or if it can, I wonder if it stole all of yours. Sword spirits aren’t traditionally vast wells of knowledge.” 

Wuya-jie didn’t even look his way. 

“What secrets are you hiding?” Wei Wuxian asked the blade in his lap, watching it shake faintly as though caught in an earthquake. It couldn’t be from Wei Wuxian—his hands were steady entirely through force of will that hadn’t failed him yet—but it appeared the spirit was unhappy to be wielded by anyone but its owner. If it wasn’t, perhaps Wuya-jie’s emotions were running higher than expected; Wei Wuxian remembered seeing Nie Mingjue’s Baxia jolt and surge when his temper flared, a long time ago. “If you’re anything like your mistress, you won’t give up a single one without a fight. What do you say?” 

The dao trembled. The trace of qi left in its form by Wuya-jie’s hand faded quickly, though not because the sword consumed it. Instead, it was as though she’d primed the blade like a seed before planting season began, preparing it for new growth. 

Or a new visitor. 

Wei Wuxian placed one hand on the hilt and the other against the sheath, as though to draw it. The blade stilled in his hands, while the signature black wisps of resentful energy wafted up from both the sword and from the shadow below Wei Wuxian’s feet. The worst of it came from Chenqing, though the flute was otherwise inert in its place at his belt. 

“Wuya-jie, don’t let me stay under too long,” Wei Wuxian called to her, briefly catching her attention again. “The Jiang sect bell will do, if you have one.” He knew she did; no disguise would be complete without it, and Jiang Cheng was more thorough with that kind of detail than he’d ever been before. Wei Wuxian waited until her off hand went to her belt and the bell there, then told the dao, “Let’s see it, then.” 

Dark as thorough as the Burial Mounds’ shadows leapt up to meet him.

* * *

The first thing Tomoe remembered from that night was blood.

First blood in her mouth, then lightning _(like being struck with Zidian)_ in her veins, then she smelled smoke and jerked awake.

"T-Tomoe-chan, we need to get out of here." Tomoe _(Wei Wuxian)_ didn't recognize the voice at first, too busy fighting the sudden dizziness that wracked her body. What _happened?_ Aside from deep, blank patches, she could only remember the wedding itself.

_(Dissonance—the word “wedding” conjured half a vision of red and joy and then solemnity and loss—until Wei Wuxian tasted his own blood in his mouth. Wei Wuxian wrenched the memory into order, falling deeper into Empathy to the sound of Wu Xue—Tomoe’s? —archery progress.)_

“Shinta-kun, what's _happening?”_ Her voice _(around the wrong words)_ was flat and cold, making Shinta flinch. No. Cower, curled in a terrified ball. His forearm bled from a ring of punctures that could only be from human teeth. Hers. “What did you do?”

"Th-The clan. The Asakura clan—" One of Shinta’s hands clamped over the wound, shoving a white sleeve over it as though that would hide the blood. "Th-They're attacking! I didn't know. I swear I didn't!"

_(“Da-shixiong, it’s Sixth Shidi—” Wei Wuxian grabbed the dao’s spirit with a tendril of power from Chenqing, imagining scruffing it like a naughty kitten before it could shove Wang Lingjiao’s crimes in his face. No. He’d relived that moment enough in his nightmares.)_

Tomoe shoved Shinta aside, scrambling to her feet. She tore the wedding chamber apart in moments, fear giving her more force than grace. How she could be caught so totally off guard? Someone should have— It was impossible that everyone was already gone— _Where is Yukishiro?!_

"T-Tomoe-chan—" 

Heart in her throat, Tomoe laid hands on both katana and tantō at long last and let out a slow breath of relief. The gaping hole in her memory didn’t stop habit from placing weaponry everywhere she’d need them later. If she had just been able to string enough thoughts together and hide her _armor_ in here— 

“Shinta-kun.” Tomoe clenched her jaw before she regained enough control to speak without snapping. Yukishiro slid free of its sheath and vibrated faintly as the blade’s thirst woke. “Please tell me what is happening.”

"The A-Asakura clan, th-they drugged us," he gasped, his violet eyes wide. _(Wei Wuxian never knew Wu Tao this young, or in this much distress, but he knew that face now.)_ “I r-recovered, b-but your family—!”

 _(Wei Wuxian could see nothing but Wen Ning’s quiet pleading, his collar in Wei Wuxian’s hands when Jiang Cheng was_ gone. _Forcing himself to let Wen Ning go took all the strength he could muster, even with Zidian’s whip-marks burning fresh down his back and terror thrumming through his limbs. If Wen Ning hadn’t betrayed his own clan and found a way to bring Jiang Cheng to that waiting boat—)_

Tomoe failed to muster any rage over the half-expected betrayal, when she’d never trusted them in the first place _(but the grief coiled under her ribs and stuck in her throat in a way Wei Wuxian knew all too well)._ Shinta, whom she knew and considered a friend, was still here. Wasn't attacking. Or defending.

Tomoe stepped closer, looming over Shinta with Yukishiro’s bare blade unmoving in the air. Her voice _(steady despite the way the cadence was all wrong and her emotions were a maelstrom)_ was like ice. "Give me one good reason to let you live."

Shinta, on his knees already, pressed his forehead to the floor in a deep, sincere bow. Not like a martial artist or a servant or soldier, or even a husband to a wife _(and Wei Wuxian thinks,_ what?). Shinta, still on his knees, leans over far enough that his hands are flat on the floor. The sheer unexpectedness of this deep bow made Tomoe recoil. She was no daimyō. Even in the worst of her towering wrath, this was—she couldn’t—

_(Wei Wuxian watched the vision lurch sideways, showing instead a man in cloth-and-steel armor standing over the corpse of an old man in roughspun robes, saying in a voice just shy of laughter, “See? There’s no better way to test the edge of a new blade.” And all the men around him nodded and joked while a stomach that wasn’t Wei Wuxian’s wanted to empty across the ground—_

_She’d felt the old man die. Felt his qi fade to nothing after the fatal strike, after a wave of terror, despair, and then resignation upon being surrounded by warriors._

_Wei Wuxian measured the somewhat uncertain distance with his eyes, from the point of the dao to the corpse Tomoe hadn’t approached, and tried not to think about the implications for himself.)_

“Shinta,” Tomoe said, kneeling to match him and placing her empty hand against his shoulder. Her eyes burned and vision blurred, but it was almost certainly smoke. She shook him gently when he didn’t respond, letting Yukishiro’s point drop to the floor. “Shinta, get up. We don’t have time for this.” 

Shinta lifted his head, and his pupils were almost large enough to blot out the purple in his eyes. “T-Tomoe-chan—” 

“I forgive you.” _(“There is nothing to forgive. Whatever else I might become, I am not a monster to you. No matter what else I will become in the future,” was what Wei Wuxian heard, the words pressed up against the back of Tomoe’s throat but unable to break free. Seemed like she’d always had that problem.)_ Tomoe took a careful breath and asked, “Will you help me save them?” 

_(The memory blurred, spiraling into shadow for a few frantic heartbeats. Faces flashed past Wei Wuxian’s perception, too quickly to recall any features later in a manner that felt deliberate. It felt like his hand—or mind, in this case—being smacked to avoid touching a hot stove.)_

"Forgive me, forgive me. I should have been here, Oniisama," Tomoe’s voice murmured, head bowed and hands clasped as she prayed over the headless corpse of a man in fine robes. The smell of blood sat thick in the air _(like Lotus Pier in the stolen moment Wei Wuxian and Jiang Cheng snuck back in, terrified of what they’d find for so long that the confirmation almost couldn’t hurt worse),_ unable to tell where one grisly scene ended and the other began. “I will avenge us.”

 _(The scene went hazy and dull again, until)_ Tomoe found Utane and Suzume dead on the floor, surrounded by the bodies of four more Asakura warriors and a wreck of a corpse that might have been Takahiro. _(The faces appeared as though on a silk screen overlaying the scene, trying to push Wei Wuxian’s attention away.)_ In the back of the room, behind an overturned table, Tomoe spotted one pale arm lying motionless in a pool of dark blood. Too small to be an adult's arm.

Behind her, Shinta retched.

 _The Asakura clan will pay. I’ll kill every last one of them._ Tomoe’s hands moved almost without thought, closing eyes of corpses as she came across them. Her mouth moved silently, reciting more prayers as she found more and more of her family dead. In her chest, her heart picked up a different rhythm, to the beat of her world sliding sideways into the abyss. _I don't care how long it will take me. I can be patient, but I will kill them_ all _in the end._

_(Wei Wuxian felt his own hands clenched tight over that corrupted jian from the Xuanwu’s gullet as though nailed there. No matter that the sword was long gone, forced into shape as the Yin Tiger Seal, or that the Burial Mounds no longer had him within the grasp of thousands of ghostly hands. The sense memory overlapped with the burn of Tomoe’s—Wu Xue’s—dao as it dragged him headlong through the memories._

_“Do you want revenge, Wei Wuxian?” asked the restless dead, swirling above and around him with their voices barely audible in the cacophony. Their energy clawed at him, invading, constraining—_

_And he’d said, “Yes.”)_

While his hair was plastered to his face with blood and his breaths were faint, Tomoe’s youngest nephew still lived. Tomoe patted his cheek, smearing even more blood across her already-damp hands. She didn’t know how badly Yūki was hurt, but perhaps… “Yūki, Yūki, Obachan is right here. Open your eyes for me, please.” 

He didn’t wake. His spiritual energy fluttered under her hands as she lifted him into her arms, weak as a bird’s, and Tomoe briefly froze in place as the sound of distant shouting wove its way through the halls. She needed both hands to fight. They were unspeakably outnumbered, with no sure ways out of the fortress. 

Shinta coughed behind her. After wiping his mouth on his sleeve, he held out both arms beseechingly. “I-I can carry Yūki-chan. I can't fight, b-but…” He swallowed hard, still looking faint. “I can heal him, Tomoe. Please.”

 _(The sword spirit tried to move Wei Wuxian’s attention away, but he still saw)_ the briefest glimpse of Yūki’s baby teeth before Shinta pushed his mouth shut on the meat of his arm, wincing as the blood started flowing fast down toward his elbow. 

“There are ways out of even a burning castle.” _(Wei Wuxian didn’t need to know her well to hear the strain in her voice; the carefully placed lie and desperation for a solution even when everything crashed down around their ears. It wasn’t so different to his own confident front, just before the surgery.)_ "Follow me."

_(And then the dao’s spirit used the moment of bafflement to shove him forward anyway, skipping over a moment that left a shapeless impression of blood and death. Shadows cast by licking flames convinced him there was nothing good to be found in that gap.)_

The arrow tore free and Tomoe lost the thread of thought entirely, only realizing she’d muffled a scream in her horribly stained sleeves when she tasted cloth. Her whole body tensed, spasmed with pain around the other arrow, rabbit-kicking against the snow for a few heartbeats. When it was over, her breathing was no easier—the other was in just the right spot to make anything deeper than shallow gasps impossible. 

Shinta’s horrified face was a blur framed by his dark red hair, the world narrowed to the point of the arrow he’d just ripped out of her shoulder.

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—” Shinta managed, only taking his eyes off her face briefly to check if Yūki was still in his nest. He should have made Tomoe move or moved her nephew, but this process was already started. 

_No stopping now._ “Ah, I—ah, it hurts,” was what came out of Tomoe’s clenched teeth, but the eyes that refocused on Shinta’s were still aware through the pain. Blood, bright and terrible, seeped steadily from both wounds. No time. “Just—next. Next one. _Now.”_

_(Wei Wuxian shifted the vision along, and this time the dao didn’t fight him. It actually sped up, showing fragments and narrowing focus on shorter, clearer memories drenched in less blood. For the spirit of a blade, such a choice was—well, Wei Wuxian didn’t know. Before this, he’d only performed Empathy a few times, in a safe ritual space with more Jiang bells as backup, and never on an object instead of a ghost or corpse._

_But was he or wasn’t he the one who forged his dark path in the heart of the Burial Mounds?_

_He dove in again.)_

“If you were anyone else, I would never even consider—” 

“I know,” Tomoe interrupted, her voice like steel. In her mind’s eye, she could still see the fear in Shinta’s fever-bright eyes as the servants pulled him from the donkey’s back and dragged him to the clan’s doctor. “But I am _not_ anyone else. And I am asking.”

“You can’t expect me to lie to my husband,” Sumomo protested. When she moved, it was carefully done. Her face was so much like Tomoe’s, down to the brow and mouth, but her features were tense with fear and grief. _(Wei Wuxian had never seen this woman before in his life, and likely wouldn’t recognize her if they met but it didn’t take much to recognize a pregnancy too far along to risk putting the mother under this much stress.)_ “He may be yours by technicality, but that boy’s family _destroyed ours.”_

“The only reason _I_ lived is because he turned on them. No sword will touch him,” Tomoe said after she’d forced her voice to perfect poise again, even as she reached out and settled her hand on top of her sister’s. “Not even yours.”

She was not _miraculously_ immune to being drugged and beheaded. Based on what she’d pieced together during the grueling journey down from the mountains, a dosage that incapacitated her brothers ought to have killed her. A true agent of her clan’s enemies _might_ have wanted her kept alive, but Shinta would have given his life to see her escape. 

In the end, she owed Shinta her life twice over for that night. After his fever set in, she might be able to remove one debt.

 _(Wei Wuxian thought,_ If only life was anything like that simple.)

Sumomo’s spirit twisted in denial. Into something her baby sister recognized, but not in her. “Don’t tell me you plan to act as though that wedding meant anything. Did you two—?”

“No.” 

“Then it can be dismissed and forgotten. There are no living witnesses besides the two of you.” Sumomo didn’t tug her hands away, but they did twitch under Tomoe’s palm. “You can stay here. He _won’t.”_

“So I should stay, waiting for the moment your husband _might_ rally his clan for revenge? Let responsibility fall to someone who wasn’t _there?”_ Tomoe shook her head, pulling back and standing. “If I have to choose between safety and extracting the blood debt _by my own hand—”_

“Tomoe—” her sister tried to interrupt, missing her hand by a hair. 

“—then I know exactly what I’ll choose.” She rose, picking Yukishiro off the floor and bowing to her sister. “Goodbye, Oneesan.” 

“Then you’re dead to us!” 

“So be it.” 

_(The dao surged to life again, but this time the shadow that leaked into Wei Wuxian’s view came directly from the floor. After a few seconds, they spread across the room until they shifted and morphed into fully-fledged ghosts arranged like a banquet hall, blocking out the walls and doors with sheer numbers. Men, women, and children whose features were slack in death, sporting lethal wounds where skin was visible and large bloodstains where fine silk robes were soaked through. The attending resentment drifted around the room, faintly stirring in an undetectable wind, and the ghosts kept staring with hollow eyes. The spiraling trails of gray and black led back to the dao like unattended ink._

_When Wei Wuxian tweaked just the edge of the writhing mass, they turned on him as one. The room around them faded entirely, leaving Tomoe and her sister as empty silhouettes in a black void. The ghosts remained. They watched._

_A man with Tomoe’s nose and a slit-open throat drifted forward, flanked by a woman in her fifties, half her head caved in from bludgeoning and one eye dangling. They parted around Wei Wuxian, silent, until he turned to track their movements. Maybe to follow._

_And Wei Wuxian saw a beheaded man in the edged-red robes of a Wen, clutched between the pair and their ragged, clawed hands. The man in foreign garb slowly dragged the Wen corpse across what might have once been a floor, back toward the waiting gallery of ghosts, while the woman cradled the head in her hands as gently as a child._

_The head pleaded silently with Wei Wuxian, but Wei Wuxian recognized the face there. Even as the hairline crawled back from anything that could support a guan, shortening and reshaping itself under the weight of the ghosts’ expectations. Years of stress melted away from the person who must have been Tomoe’s last victim before meeting Wei Wuxian, even if he was decapitated. One of the first corpses he’d raised without the head attached, before he realized he was capable of it, while still building his army and not entirely aware there was someone else picking at the Wens’s army._

_Wei Wuxian let the other ghosts swarm that one under without lifting a finger, and then they parted to reveal a new scene.)_

“Tomoe, I wanted to ask if you’d wait.” Shinta swayed like a reed in the wind as hands reached out to steady him _(on a different day than the last vision Wei Wuxian experienced, finally identifying budding cherry blossoms outside the shuttered window)._ His left arm sported bandages from wrist to elbow and Tomoe’s hands flinched away from taking hold of it, gripping his shoulders instead. And still, his voice said, “T-to take me with you.” 

Tomoe’s hand stilled against his arm. “Are you sure?” 

“I can’t stay,” Shinta said softly. “And I don’t have anywhere else to go.” 

This bond, here and now, was something Tomoe wouldn’t kill. In herself, or in him. _(Wei Wuxian could only think of Shijie’s declaration yesterday when she’d finally gotten him and Jiang Cheng together and hugged them both, that the three of them would never separate again. It was strange to hear the same sentiment echoed in someone else’s heart.)_

“Of course,” Tomoe whispered. “Of course you’ll come with me.” 

_(The chorus of ghosts reeled back, but not far. Instead, they began to slowly swirl around the dao still present in the scene._ Look at this, look at us, _they seemed to say. Between the silk and ceremonial regalia, marks of wealth that they carried even in death on half-visible bodies, there were flashes of other scenes.)_

Tomoe stood in the middle of a room lined with paper screens, looming over a headless corpse and resultant blood spilled across the low table. With her bloodstained silver-and-red robes long since replaced by ash-gray and black, to show fewer stains _(and hide any injuries, which had been Wei Wuxian’s first thought after crawling out of the Burial Mounds)_. While her katana dropped blood briefly onto the tatami flooring, a quick flick of her wrist sent the worst of it splattering across the corpse. 

_Not tenchū,_ Tomoe thought _(as Wei Wuxian heard “divine judgement” and felt his ears ring with her bone-deep resignation of an unpleasant task started at last)._ She drew a handkerchief from one sleeve and carefully wiped the blood from her katana, then tucked it back into her sleeve and sheathed the sword. With all the candles in the room already snuffed _(and not the slightest idea that her night vision was not quite natural),_ there was a much lower risk of Asakura Yosada’s guards realizing their charge lay in two pieces strewn across his office. Having to catch the head as it fell was a small price to pay.

The servants would be horrified in a few hours. 

Tomoe didn’t have it in her to feel guilt, even after weighing that thought for several heartbeats. Whatever hesitation remained regarding killing had long since been burned out of her. 

After sheathing Yukishiro, Tomoe crossed the room silently and began looking through paperwork _(with such different usage of characters that Wei Wuxian could only make vague sense of the first page)._ Her search was over in less than the time it took for the rest of the castle to work their way through their patrol routes. Tomoe folded the documents neatly and tucked them inside her robes, stood still for a few seconds to listen for any possible interference, then went to the window. _(For all the fuss she made—silently—about flying across the length of the cultivation world to Qinghe, she had no qualms about just jumping from a fortress’s walls.)_ Before long, she’d slipped away from the fortress with enough time to avoid even the first outcry. 

It was hours later before she returned to the inn, woke Shinta just before dawn, and the pair of them began the slow trek onward. 

_(The coils of resentful energy from the dao’s small army of ghosts turned Wei Wuxian around with none of the unthinking, unreasoning malice of the Burial Mounds and the sword that would become the Yin Tiger Seal._

_All of them were watching him, insofar as those white eyes could. On the edges of the scenes thus far, he’d felt them tugging at his awareness and shoving other ghosts into their ranks. Hiding information they didn’t want him to see._

_Hiding her. No one in that fortress even_ began _to notice there was a stranger painting their walls with their master’s blood._

_“She never had to actually turn to you, did she?” Wei Wuxian asked, and the legless shades parted before him like reeds as he strode forward into their ranks. “You’re following this story to the end.”_

_He had no idea if any of the Dongying ghosts could understand him, but they’d given him enough room to maneuver within Empathy to feel an impending headache. Perhaps that information exchange went both ways, for all that they were too dead to learn much besides how to hate. Wei Wuxian doubted there was a single ghost here who’d seen all of the people and the names that the bearer of their grudge viewed as her goal._

_“Show me what happened to the others.”_

_Several of the ghosts flew apart like sand tossed into a headwind, directly in his path. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted which of them reconstituted themselves behind him, and the dark path unfurled._

_Behind the ranks of obscuring shades and shadow, dozens upon dozens of bodies lay in various states of decay. Bare skeletons made up the base of an unnerving pile, crushed under the weight of corpses stacked atop them like firewood scraps. Most of them still wore armor or clothing identical to that of the first man the dao showed Wei Wuxian, with the exception of a lone skull—patches of long, withered hair still attached—that had been wearing seven layers of now-ruined silk regalia. Above that bottom layer, fresher corpses lay scattered all around, each showing less rot than the one below. As many patterns of robes as corpses were easily visible, until the final corpse was the man in Wen robes Wei Wuxian had identified forever ago._

_“So, you made a promise not to rest until every single person on that revenge list joins you here,” Wei Wuxian said to the dao spirit, to the ghosts of a dead family arranged without a shrine to honor them. Their sighs rang in his ears like most of the sounds here hadn’t, and he asked, “Did you ever even need this power?”_

_And behind him, a voice said, “It was never about need,” in a very familiar, unamused cadence._

_Wei Wuxian spun on the spot, but—_

* * *

—when he opened his real eyes, the sunlight was cheerfully trying to put them out. He shoved his hand over his face with a groan, rubbing at them with his fingertips as though a massage would make them recover faster. He leaned forward over his knees and blinked rapidly once he felt comfortable enough to risk it, and then blinked again in surprise. 

Wuya-jie—or Tomoe or Wu Xue or whoever she really wanted to be—sat next to him on the bench, her expression completely unreadable. At some point after Wei Wuxian entered Empathy, she’d put her Jiang outer robe back on and unstrung the borrowed bow, and taken the time to clear out all the wasted arrows she’d originally left strewn all over the range. The worrisome tainted dao rested against her knee, placid, and generally not looking like something that _made_ about half the ghosts Wei Wuxian saw in its depths. 

Most importantly, she held up both of her hands. In one, there was a folded silk handkerchief next to the Jiang sect bell she’d likely used to rouse him. Dangling from the other hand was a small but identifiable jar of Qinghe liquor. 

“I still have questions,” Wei Wuxian told her through a dry mouth, but accepted the handkerchief first. “But if bribery is your idea of an apology for what your dao just put me through, I think you’re one step closer to forgiveness than most people would be. Just a thought.”

Wuya-jie—who had never said not to call her that—rolled her eyes and set the jar on the bench, within easy reach. 

Dabbing at his upper lip revealed a slowing nosebleed, which made Wei Wuxian grimace, but it wasn’t his first brush with wild resentful energy. Not everything could be as biddable as Chenqing. In fact, _literally_ nothing tainted so thoroughly even made an attempt to play nice. There was a much stronger trend of attempted possession and generally protracted, horrible death. Most of his time in the Burial Mounds—no, none of it bore thinking about. 

None of Wuya-jie’s ghosts had actually laid hands on him. They were just _impatient._

“Wanted power,” Wuya-jie said after a while, nudging the jar toward him. She waited—or composed her answer while he shook the jar experimentally—before saying, “Our approaches are not the same.” 

Wei Wuxian’s eyes narrowed at her, though he still broke the seal on the jar and took a long swig. With all the foreign names and concepts swirling in his head, he needed wine now rather than later. Qinghe’s baijiu kicked like few others, but this tasted much milder than he’d expected. 

“Not intended. Already haunted, then added to it.” Wuya-jie said, after Wei Wuxian took his second sip more slowly. She tapped her fingers against the dao’s hilt. The tiniest flicker of resentful energy wafted from her dao to her hand, then coiled up her fingers. As Wei Wuxian watched, she pinched the trailing tail with her other hand before pressing it back into the cloth wrap. 

“It really seemed more like you’re feeding them. When you made that oath, I bet you didn’t expect to be haunted—or making your sword a corrupted thing—but once you had done it, there was no turning back.” Wei Wuxian tilted his head to one side. “I’m right, aren’t I?” 

“It is not… _butsudan—”_ which hit Wei Wuxian’s ears as “altar” and made his now-real headache a smidge worse, “—but…” Wuya-jie paused, clearly frustrated despite the blank look on her face. It was in the angle of her head and the way her grip on her dao had changed while she tried to think. Her face was as still as Lan Zhan’s. 

Wei Wuxian set the jar down and said, every bit as slowly as Wuya-jie did, _“This better?”_ in her language instead. 

As soon as the words left his mouth, he grimaced. It was much stranger than trying to speak in a different province’s dialect. The syllables weren’t impossible to pronounce, but the first attempt felt unwieldy on his tongue and the tone was flatter than he’d expected, all emphasis in length of the sound instead of pattern. He needed more time to figure out how to form a full sentence, because he was fairly sure Dongying natives spoke with very different rules. How did a sentence become _more_ polite with more sounds in it?

Wuya-jie was staring at him in surprise. It didn’t look too different than her normal expression, except for the way she’d stopped blinking. 

“Ah, don’t look at me like that! I may not have the patience to sit through lessons, but I definitely noticed how you and your brother talk to each other. Languages are all about patterns, so it’s not so hard.” He forced a grin, which Wuya-jie didn’t appear to buy. She never did. “Seriously, it’s a great idea. Try talking to me in your language and I’ll talk to you in mine.”

Wuya-jie eyed him. Then, in a whisper: _“Your technique was more dangerous than expected.”_

Wei Wuxian took another swallow of his liquor, mostly as a bid for time to think. And while he’d never tried to outdrink a hangover, he could certainly experiment on an Empathy headache. The bleeding had already stopped, anyway. “Not so much! And you were trying to answer my question about those ghosts, but I’ve figured it out. They’re your family, so of course they’re watching over you. You’d have let them keep to a family altar if there was one, but there’s not, so you didn’t, and now they’re following the dao around. And you.”

Wuya-jie kept staring.

With a slightly exaggerated sigh, he said, “I don’t know why you’re so worried. I’m fine.”

 _“What you are is a liar.”_ Her voice was too mild to be truly scolding, but he felt it anyway. Shijie kept her disappointment couched in gentle concern at most, while Wen Qing had threatened to stab him twice with her needles already for failing to eat or sleep properly. Wuya-jie apparently preferred mimicking the icy judgment of the Lan clan instead. _“Every living person has spiritual energy I can read. And I can_ tell _when you lie to me.”_

The bottom dropped out of Wei Wuxian’s stomach. Right. That. He’d almost managed to wholly suppress the realization that Wuya-jie could apparently _read qi_ close enough to know all the stages of violent death. Her memories were studded with flares of emotion from people she saw without using her eyes, whether they were friend or foe. It wasn’t even a matter of cultivation strength—Jiang Cheng had already told him not to expect either Wuya-jie or her brother to ever fly—but of some strange, foreign ability to see inside people as though their thoughts were plain as day. 

Which meant that she’d known he didn’t have a golden core from the moment they’d met. 

And never said anything. Never asked, just like he hadn’t asked any important questions until they were back in the cultivation world and all the strangeness was thrown into stark relief. All Wei Wuxian knew at the time was that a strange, bloodthirsty rogue took a long look at his army of ghosts, then at him, and shrugged. 

“You can’t tell anyone.” Because if she told anyone, the whole edifice would come crashing down. Demonic cultivation, from start to finish, the result of a series of frantic improvisations in the face of his life crumbling around his ears. 

_“It cannot possibly be more obvious that you keep secrets.”_ Emboldened by the presence of someone who understood her, Wuya-jie deliberately swept her eyes up and down Wei Wuxian’s appearance. It was very judgmental, Wei Wuxian thought with the part of his mind that wasn’t shrieking. _“And I do not_ talk _to anyone. Particularly not about my methods.”_

“That’s not what I meant and you know it!” Wei Wuxian realized he’d shouted the instant after he’d done it, then slammed control down over his temper like a grease fire. Quieter, but no less insistent, he said, “Wuya-jie, you can’t tell anyone about my qi, or anything about demonic cultivation. It goes entirely against orthodoxy, and we have so many more important things to argue about than a method that will end the war faster. After everything we’ve learned about Wen Ruohan—”

 _“I do not want to hear excuses,”_ Wuya-jie said, which made Wei Wuxian’s heart thud painfully until she went on, _“because they are not necessary. Do as you wish.”_

“You don’t care?” 

_“No.”_

And perhaps on a different morning—afternoon—Wei Wuxian would stick around to argue with her about it and really drive home the importance of secrecy. Or interrogate her about any of the dozens of questions that Empathy vision had raised. The option was there, now that they had enough of a common language to make sure all the blows landed where they intended. He could almost feel the demand for a vow of silence building behind his teeth, but they were in the middle of the Unclean Realm and a much larger war. And he had a headache in full, now, which wasn’t doing wonders for anyone. 

Wei Wuxian instead snatched up the half-empty liquor and left, downing the entire rest of it before he was entirely out of her sight. 

* * *

> _To Wu Tao, of Yunmeng Jiang,_
> 
> _Until you sent me your much-belated reply, I had no idea you’d managed to get yourself accepted into a sect! Congratulations on your good fortune in being noticed in such a positive way, but maybe you could actually use better fortune, since I hear there is a small war in progress._
> 
> _I’ll make sure to include you in my prayers the next time I visit a temple, as long as the gods there are tolerant of this humble servant’s graphic description of what I’d want to happen to people who might mean you harm. Such a search may take months, so don’t go getting stabbed before I can talk someone important around to my line of thinking. I’d have no choice but to collapse in despair. Or charge into battle with a cleaver. It would be a little pathetic, so stay safe and ensure that doesn’t have to happen._
> 
> _To your sister,_ ~~_whose beauty outshines_ ~~ _~~whose smile is~~ _ _who asked me about the progress I’m making: I now have_ two _dogs. Nothing else could more quickly summarize my success in Lanling, because nothing proves “wealth” like repeatedly discovering dog hair in every meal. I’m going to either die choking on fur or by being murdered for insulting both dogs where their masters can hear. Make sure my funeral is tasteful._
> 
> _Try to visit when you have the time. As much company as I have, I miss you both._
> 
> _At your service as always,_
> 
> _Chen Hao, currently of Lanling_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wei Wuxian's going to have to come back and ask some clarifying questions once he calms down. 
> 
> Tomoe's nephew survived that night, though she's had no contact with him or with any other member of her family since becoming a ronin and going on the run.  
> Empathy is, per the wiki, "involves channeling a spirit to see their past memories. Memories are shared exactly as experienced, with an emphasis on emotional state and feeling." This version of Empathy went a little sideways due to two factors: Yukishiro being a haunted katana as opposed to a ghost in its own right, and the fact that Tomoe was trying to break the spell toward the end there. Both by removing the sword from Wei Wuxian's grasp and using the Jiang sect's Clarity bell.  
> "Tsujigiri" (literally "crossroads killing") is a possibly-apocryphal practice by samurai, who would test new blades on live human targets. Usually an unarmed passerby. During the chaos of the Sengoku Jidai, it was definitely _possible_ to behave like this, because nobody was exactly enforcing rule of law for most of that century. Incidentally, a British merchant named Charles Richardson absolutely _did_ get killed during the 1800s for getting too close to the Satsuma daimyo's procession, though accounts differ on who's most to blame for provoking the whole thing. Look up the Namamugi Incident and decide for yourself.  
> The word "adauchi" is a type of revenge where the family of a murdered samurai seeks vengeance on the killers. The translations vary from "blood debt" to "vengeance" to "retribution." Regardless of exact wording, Tomoe is definitely doing that.  
> In Japanese, the word "kegare" refers to spiritual pollution/defilement, in this case resulting from contact with death (regardless of circumstances). It's not the same as the resentful energy (or "yin" energy) that Wei Wuxian uses to manipulate the dead, but both concepts seem to require ritual purification after exposure.
> 
> Let me know if I can help explain anything else!


	10. Avoidance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If Wei Wuxian keep avoiding so many people he's gonna end up avoiding the whole camp...wait, where did he go?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT 2/24/2021: This chapter has been revamped for clarity and flow, changing the order of events.

It was a lovely night in Lanling. The city slept like a well-fed tiger, fearing none of the smaller beasts in the empire because there was nothing _to_ fear. There were watchtowers here and there, and the city itself had sprawled far beyond the defensive walls built centuries beforehand (and long since scavenged for stone), but it was as though the shadow of war hardly obscured the gilded glint of the Jin clan’s seat. Ordinary people complained about trade routes being strained here or there, or about the weather, or the rising price of one thing or another. Lanling Jin felt no strain, at least as far as anyone could see. 

There was enough gold in one corner of Koi Tower’s outbuilding roofs to feed a modestly-sized village for a full year. Furthermore, everyone knew it. For that reason, Wataru smiled and bowed and carefully avoided offending the rich young masters of the sect. 

Or any other sect. Or really just anybody who even vaguely looked like authority. He’d toed very close to the line of “being noticed” multiple times in his career, and now was not the time for taking risks. 

It was easier to remain gently ignored as an apothecary than as a doctor, Wataru thought. While he managed a stockroom and the storefront, with occasional help, very little of the direct attention of the cultivators fell on deferential, almost-sycophantic Chen Hao. His collaborator two streets over dealt with the complaints more often, particularly about symptoms and prices. It did exactly no favors for Yamaguchi-sensei—or Liu-daifu, here—and his already-prickly personality. 

Most things didn’t. He’d been in Lanling so long that his mannerisms mimicked the locals, and that similarity extended to a certain affected (or genuine) callousness. 

“Be less useless than your predecessor and we’ll get along,” the man had said, upon meeting Wataru again for the first time in five years. He didn’t look up from his rows upon rows of acupuncture needles while speaking. “Don’t disappoint me.” 

“That shouldn’t be so hard,” Wataru had replied, letting the worst of the man’s bitterness wash right over him with no effect. “Wasn’t Ota-san embezzling?” 

“I said what I said.” 

Living in Lanling wasn’t too bad, really.

Even after having spent a long day percolating in the smell of every dried thing in the shelves, he had a little time for leisure at the end. With his sleeves pulled back in preparation for writing, Wataru tapped the non-business end of his brush against his mouth as he considered the letter on his desk, and the constraints on what he could say. The mail service could do with a few improvements, but there _was_ a war to consider. Even if the Nie sect didn’t censor messages that left their domain, Wataru kept most of the identifiable information out of his replies. The resulting letters were as bland as plain mantou and far less capable of sustaining a person through a lonely existence. 

Perhaps as a result of this inability to get a single long-distance message across intact, Wataru generally tried to make friends among his agents. Sort of. When they appeared. 

“What do you think, Xiaomei?” Wataru asked the dog by his leg. “Should I try writing some poetry back?”

Xiaomei—Asagi—snuffled sleepily into a cushion and rolled over, exposing her white underbelly. Her upside-down face made her black lips droop toward the floor until another turn smushed her face into the fabric, making her entire head seem like it was melting. On a dog whose color Wataru usually compared to roasted chicken, the result leaned toward “accident with rock sugar.”

“Yeah, I suppose I wouldn’t want to be too forward.” Wataru set down his brush. “You win.” 

On this particular night, the deep bone ache of having sat at a desk for too long finally won out over Wataru’s desire to make actual progress with his work. Setting everything aside and hiding his various (suspicious) tools away, Wataru checked in on the house’s other resident—a very nice older woman who pinched his nose when he teased her—and started the process of boiling water for a late pot of tea for himself. It wouldn’t do much for his candle-mauled night vision or anything like that, but Aki-obasan was going to sleep early and Wataru still needed something to do with his hands. 

Half an hour and one set of snores later, Wataru opened a window to enjoy his evening and was squashed into the floor by a different dog. 

It was a little different from the other times people used his upper rooms as a thoroughfare, if only because the things that knocked on the shutters generally had thumbs. Having expected to spend a serene night watching the stars and artfully mooning over his distant love, it was something of a letdown. Moreso when he realized the primary cause of his squashing was Fuse’s decision to _throw her dog at the shutter._

His agents needed their sense of “fun” recalibrated for normal humans. 

“Probably should’ve asked Hatake-senpai for more details before accepting this post,” Wataru said to himself, scratching the side of his face. The welt there still itched, despite the salve generously applied by an apologetic face-stomper. And the lick from the dog. “But would that have even helped?” 

His tone was entirely mild, as though his new Lanling house was not currently occupied by two large dogs and two of Sakumo’s more rambunctious shinobi. He’d almost gotten used to having only one giant fluffball and one would-be grandmother around during the day.

At least it wasn’t the shop. _None_ of them were allowed near the shelves, but Wataru did have a few jars of salve stored for occasions like this one. 

The two troublemakers were currently snarling—quietly—at each other like angry alley cats. Wouldn’t do to wake the neighbors of the “respectable” Chen Hao. He’d put rather a lot of work into maintaining a reputation of forthright business and would probably have to drown them both in the well if they ruined it. Not that he really expected to succeed if he tried, but it was the principle of the thing. 

“—not even the worst thing—”

“—wouldn’t know a good idea if it bit you in the _face—”_

Wataru idly ducked as a beaded pillow sailed across the room, wishing he had a few more peers to commiserate with at the moment. While he sat on the chair and watched the ongoing argument, the pillow landed squarely atop the curly-tailed dog asleep against the nearby wall. The second dog, asleep next to her—a huge, scarred hound—startled awake with a riot of dull claws on wooden floors as he shot to his feet in the slightly wrong order.

The loud _thud_ as the dog struck a table leg at least made both Fuse and Yatsu shut up for a few seconds. Not for the first time, Wataru thanked his own foresight for not getting the tea ready before the pair of them got the argument out of their systems. 

“Your mother’s still sleeping, Yatsu-kun,” Wataru said into the silence, “so please keep it down. Both of you.” 

At that point, Teikō shook himself to recover from the impact, got to his feet, and sprawled heavily over Yatsu’s lap like an affectionate rug. Across the table, Asagi—or Xiaomei—oozed onto Fuse and kept her from even attempting to lunge across the table. There was something to be said about spiritual dogs and their ability to read a room, even if they did quite a lot to coat most innocent living spaces in hair and mud. Usually in that order, during the spring shedding session.

Wataru didn’t quite know what he’d done to deserve managing these two—no, wait, he did. He’d stopped taking Hatake’s orders for a year. And running off to Yunmeng in the middle of that. Reporting back to Ningbo had been only a _little_ hideously awkward. 

Such was life. 

“If Xiaomei and Xiaodi are the only level-headed people in the room besides me, I’m going to wait until you can talk over tea without losing those sad excuses for tempers,” Wataru said, referring to each dog and getting polite “whuffs” along the way. “And I actually have a decent blend today.” 

It took long enough that Wataru had tea and snacks waiting for them when they finally escaped the disciplinary dogs. Once they were all seated at the table like people (and dogs), Wataru doled out the meal. Which was mostly cold buns and the like, granted, but he’d cook for people at midnight as soon as they actually paid him specifically for that service. 

The pair working for Wataru were decent enough at their assignments, if quirky. And were currently sitting at his table like a pair of scolded children. 

Inuzuka Fuse (alias: “Liu Yaling”) night-hunted alongside her spiritual dog Teikō (alias: “Xiaodi,” because Wataru had a theme going) as a rogue cultivator who refused to be chased out of Lanling by Jin sect cultivators. Mainly because of her nightmare dog. By the standards of cultivators, said dog was probably a yaoguai for being as smart as he was, but the Lanling Jin had more important concerns than a single hound.

Besides, quashing stories was easier during wartime, when people occasionally just went off and died. 

Wataru was pretty far along in bribing the huge hound with chicken, so there was little fear in this particular household, but he could see why the Jins would prefer to keep their fingers long-term. Healing through cultivation wasn’t quite that generous, and Fuse was too tough, fast, and vicious for any ten cultivators to confront. Her nails alone could cut through most protections, like those of a fierce corpse. 

Still human—just a little to the left. Probably had a bit of shapeshifter in the bloodline somewhere, likely wolf.

The former Hyūga Yatsu (alias: “Shang Yun”) was a blind servant retained by Wataru’s household, and he _did_ have an eyeball shortage. A quirk of his discarded clan involved powerful spiritual perception abilities, coupled with the vicious inventiveness to pinch off people’s qi pathways and directly attack their internal organs with a touch. They also tended to get rid of clan members they didn’t like by blinding them, because they were absolute tyrants to those within their reach. Not uncommon, among nobles, but no less disappointing for it. 

From Wataru’s perspective, Yatsu was a vicious apprentice shinobi who’d killed two of his clan’s elders and had to flee Nihon to continue protecting his mother. Shinobi from a different guild (read: Fuse) interfered with his execution and begged a favor to get everyone involved out of Nihon. The far-reaching consequences of the decision had yet to be resolved, but would undoubtedly follow. Probably stabby consequences. 

That didn’t mean Wataru didn’t like him, despite all that. In fact, the ongoing thread of sass in their conversations was hilarious coming from someone six years younger than him. 

“It’s not bad,” was said brat’s response to Wataru’s impeccable tea service. “Better than the powdered crap.” 

“Snob.” Fuse rolled her eyes like a competitive champion, scratching her dog’s ear with one hand tipped by sharp nails. “I was raised on that stuff.” 

“Inuzuka” was less a name for a real clan than an affectation by particularly talented houndmasters, so Fuse could dress like and otherwise style herself as a typical cultivator. Having a sweet, round face and less-exaggerated teeth than most of her kin was a big help in that matter. And while Wataru didn’t have the sharpest eye for fashions, Fuse did. She could really pretend to be a fashionable young lady—if she would ever travel without her huge hound. 

“Rogue cultivator” was good enough. 

Yatsu eyed Fuse over the top of his cup. “Just because you were raised on it doesn’t mean it’s any good.”

“I’m sure you’d know.” 

“Shut up.” 

Wataru pinched the bridge of his nose, then transitioned to rubbing his eyes. It really was late.

Hatake didn’t exactly have the pick of the litter when it came to whoever he could throw at Wataru’s regional sub-organization, but his wife’s cousin and her half-trained assassin “friend” were fairly reliable. It wasn’t really any different from Tomoe and Shinta’s situation, except that Yatsu’s mother lived in Wataru’s Lanling house and was effectively collateral to ensure his good behavior. He was one of the relatively few shinobi who’d managed to travel so far with a dependent, so Wataru figured they’d need to reward that determination even if it roused a lot of interest. 

It wouldn’t have worked like that with Tomoe and Shinta, even if one of them had wanted to stay in Ningbo and out of trouble. 

Mostly because Wataru and Hatake both knew Tomoe pursued her agenda independent of the will of any emperor under the sun. For samurai, matters of honor were like that. Which was why Yatsu’s mother got cared for and the two of them were in the wind.

Strange how the situation suited everyone involved.

“Unless you plan to work for the Jin sect, you’re going to have to live with subpar tea,” Wataru said after a while. “I’m not budgeting for luxuries.” 

“If I wanted to spend my time in a viper pit, I’d have stayed home,” Yatsu replied, failing to make a joke of it and just landing in a purely bitter tone. He drank the tea anyway. 

“Does it help any if we _know_ they’re corrupt?” Fuse asked no one in particular.

Wataru said, “Maybe?” at the same time that Yatsu said, “No.” 

Typical. If Lanling Jin was a bit _more_ corrupt, Hatake would’ve had a much easier time getting agents into the ranks of their servants. As it was, Wataru expected that Jin Guangshan’s first encounter with a kunoichi would probably end badly for any number of reasons, but the mission itself would be only a small factor.

“Sounds about right,” said Fuse, and went back to scratching her dog’s ears. “I have a few ideas, but none that will work quickly.” 

Mathematically, Fuse was probably the most likely to gut someone like a fish. Perhaps with her bare hands. Wataru tried not to think about that much.

Wataru sighed. “So, what else did you learn on your adventures?” 

And as though to the chime of some unheard gong, the pair of agents snapped to attention. 

What came pouring out of both of them was a saga of woe and drama that was almost certainly embellished. Not that Wataru didn’t appreciate embellishment _and_ their considerable quirks, but it was late. 

Wataru listened at least a little, since he had just made the request. But only a little. Mostly, his head was full of numbers. 

Running an apothecary in the middle of Lanling was not _the_ most expensive choice for a front—that might have been something to do with the silk or salt trade—but it was a job Wataru could do by maintaining stocks, balancing the books, and reading labels. There was a different agent entirely—Yamaguchi Whose-Personal-Name-He-Forgot—who’d actually been here for ages and was trained in medicine.

Or poison. There was only a difference in dosage, according to him. 

Wataru didn’t know what had happened to the overseer before him, aside from the vague thought that stealing from shinobi was a poor choice for long-term survival. Hatake couldn’t have held this position open for a year. But if he had, perhaps, put a placeholder in this spot and not made especially sure of the man’s skills (or loyalty), it’d explain why Wataru spent almost a solid month scrubbing the place from top to bottom and reorganizing everyone to report to him. None of the agents in Lanling were fools, but some of them were apparently left leaderless for a fairly long time. 

Yamaguchi would forgive him for unknowingly letting them all run amok sometime before next Tanabata. Probably. 

“—and on top of everything—”

“—which was _your_ fault—”

Maybe Wataru should have taken the entire brick of expensive compressed tea to Lanling with him and bribed his way into his agents’ good graces that much faster, but those poor Jiang cultivators were so downtrodden at the time. He’d left it in Shinta’s qiankun bag out of pity, to be miraculously discovered later. Along with even more money that neither Tomoe nor Shinta knew about at the time. They’d probably discovered the silver and long since spent it by now.

They never really asked where he got his funds, and he wasn’t about to admit anything specific to anyone except _maybe_ Xiaomei. She was trustworthy enough. And didn’t judge him for putting his wages away wherever he chose. 

To be fair to Hatake, his budget probably looked hilarious by now. Hatake had to report what he was doing to someone further up the chain, as long as he asked for any money from them. Wataru could compensate for weird agents better than many of his peers in the shinobi-wrangling business and take some of the weight off his senpai’s shoulders, mostly because he was better at finances than the average agent. And much more gregarious. 

And really good at bribes. It was a survival skill in Lanling.

Anyway. 

“Get it in writing and post it to Ningbo,” Wataru said at last, once Yatsu and Fuse had completed their usual round of shouting over each other. Wataru mostly needed to know what expenses to these two—and their less-enthusiastic comrades—had accrued while digging into the cultivation world’s secrets. And avoid waking the dogs again. 

Maybe if Wataru’s agents managed to steal a cultivation manual, Wataru could avoid being dubbed useless in Lanling and getting sent somewhere worse. Telling the fakes from the real ones was at least interesting enough by moonlight. Trying to sell encoded fans in Qinghe sounded like an even more arduous task than picking apart pamphlets. 

“Did you get the new messenger birds?” asked Fuse. When Wataru sighed at her word choice, she said, “What? It’s been more than two weeks.”

“You could send the dog. She’d be happy to run across three provinces to see her real master again,” said Yatsu. He took a long sip of his tea and pretended not to notice Fuse’s attempt to glare a hole into the side of his head. Blind or not, he could detect hostility just fine. “Or am I wrong?” 

Fuse growled, “Being right doesn’t mean you get to be a smug—” 

Wataru cleared his throat, which drew Fuse up short when she remembered he was there. Strictly speaking, Wataru knew _plenty_ Yatsu and Fuse didn’t. Living outside of Nihon for more than half his life had something to do with it. The pair of them had been stationed in Lanling as soon as Hatake finished their training, but both were only recently promoted to more interesting roles. Sometime within the last year. 

He wasn’t interested in giving relative newcomers that talk, though. Hatake should have.

“Call it a bias,” Wataru told him, shutting down further arguing. “Speaking of biases, I hear your mother rousing, Yatsu-kun. Go look after her, since I’m sure she’s sick of my face by now. While actually sick. So, y’know.” 

Yatsu’s face—what Wataru could see of it below the blindfold, anyway—went ashen even before the coughing started in the first-floor bedroom. He was halfway down the hall before Wataru managed to say anything else, even forgetting his bamboo cane in the rush. 

The first couple of times he’d done that, he’d tripped over leftover furniture from Ota’s time in residence and landed on his face.

During the repeated reorganization of the house and shop, most of the potted plants and display tables got shifted from halls and the like to the shop front, and the wooden floors were subtly adjusted to make noise in the night like those of proper castles. Both decisions were precautions. Even if Yatsu and his mother never actually said as much, the pair of them got around easier once the trip hazards and excess steps in the house were removed. Wataru hadn’t managed to find a way to modify the threshold step into something that could both be traversed by Yatsu (without his cane) _and_ avoid inviting hungry corpses into the house, but he’d get there eventually. For now, the back entrance would have to do most of the work.

“Is Aki-obasan all right?” Fuse asked, all concern now that the night’s blustering session was over. 

“She’s going to drink her weight in ginger tea by the time it’s over, but it’s really just a cough,” Wataru said, like he hadn’t been tending to her all day between customers and two restless, abbreviated catnaps. “Not a huge concern.”

“That’s something,” mumbled Fuse. 

Hyūga Aki was one of several people who couldn’t necessarily support a solo life in another empire. She didn’t have the language skills her son and Fuse had carefully built up to qualify for employment. She was just a nice older lady whose hair had gone half-gray from stress in her forties, whose white eyes only bothered Wataru for a few minutes after they first met. 

And who could probably kill someone with a poke if she was anything like her thornbush of a son. 

Though really, neither her or her son qualified as Hyūga anymore. Even if they had been born into the smallest branch house of the clan, the act of removing main branch elders through violence was probably enough to knock them both down to being Wataru’s peers in peasantry. Disgrace and exile worked like that most of the time. 

Fuse still stared after Yatsu, leaning sideways so far that her hair almost touched the floor, even with the bulk of it still restrained in twin buns atop her head. “Are you _sure_ it’s just a wind cold?”

“Yes. And not just because I’m pretty sure if I lied, he’d find a way to kill me and hide my body.” 

Fuse snorted, settling back into a prim and proper sitting position. “Oh, I’d help.” 

“I’d last exactly two seconds in a fight with either of you. Probably longer with him, though, because he’d want me to see death approaching,” Wataru said, and shrugged at the thought of potential doom. He’d gotten good at it over the years. “Really, I’m harmless.” 

“You’re the _last_ person who gets to say that,” Fuse said, disbelief written all over her face. 

“I’m a humble money-changer.” Wataru winked at her over the brim of his teacup as he took a sip. Without missing a beat, he continued a moment later with, “An accountant at best. An apothecary most of the time. A rascal for all of it!” 

“Uh-huh. I’ll finish the reports before going to bed.” Fuse picked up the bamboo walking cane Yatsu had left behind in his haste, then followed her partner. Or maybe her only equal. 

Pff. Children. The only mature ones in this house were the dogs and Aki-obasan, really.

Wataru stayed in the kitchen for a while, waiting for the rest of the household to decide whether they were going to emerge from the bedrooms or not. When the incense burner finally gave up the ghost and needed a refill, he shrugged to himself and packed up the tea accoutrements. Cleaning up after Yatsu and Fuse was more or less a daily task, whether it was because the ever-present dog hair on everything had become oppressive, or because someone had tipped over a whole jar of dried seahorses. One more night of careful cleaning was almost meditative. Not as meditative as, say, drinking sake and looking at the stars, but that was a lost cause. 

While Wataru poured dirty water out the back door, Fuse’s voice piped up behind him with, “Are you going to be up much longer?” 

“Maybe an hour.” Wataru tapped the bucket a few times on the stone to get the last drops out, then said, “Unless Obasan needs a bath? More tea? Please say it’s about tea.”

“No, she’s fine,” Fuse said, and was sitting at the table when Wataru returned. She rubbed at her nose and scowled a bit as Wataru uncapped the incense burner. “She fell asleep pretty quickly once Yatsu-kun started that lullaby. Were you two busy all day or something?” 

Wataru nodded, setting the incense aside even though the harsh medicinal smell of the storeroom was starting to seep back into the house. “You’d think everyone in Lanling caught _something_ this week. I’ve been trying to keep the customer count down, but I think Yamaguchi is out to get me for leaving the post untended or something. Honestly, all that backroom work had to be Ota-san’s fault.” Wataru canted his head to the side. “Well, no use worrying about it now.” 

“It was his fault,” Fuse said, though Wataru didn’t need the confirmation, “but he made a trip between cities a few months ago and all we found was his arm. There’s a predator in the mountains. Maybe a bat? Something that flies, anyway, and it smells awful.” She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe it spreads some kind of plague.” 

“Huh. I guess that explains why Satomi-chan sent Asagi with me.” Wataru leaned his chin on his hand. 

“I thought that was because you almost got killed by bandits.” 

“That too!” As though by the intervention of the heavens themselves, Tomoe and Shinta had appeared in the exact right moment to keep Wataru from getting quite _thoroughly_ robbed and probably left to die. This was followed immediately by Tomoe shoving a glowing hairpin through a man’s throat, and Wataru swooned.

In hindsight, that might’ve been partly due to blood loss. Or because of the head injury. Or both. 

“You can’t be trusted with your own safety,” Fuse muttered, half into her hand. Next to her, her dog’s tail thumped happily.

“Probably not.” 

“Well, hopefully you can be responsible for your own sleep schedule,” Fuse said, and rolled to her feet. “Good night, Wataru-san.” 

“Night, Fuse-chan!” 

Fuse rolled her eyes, but she waved as she headed for the stairs. 

Wataru gave Fuse a while to sort out her sleeping arrangements, then started dousing candles. He’d have to get his pining done on some other night. 

* * *

Jiang Yanli wasn’t the first to notice that Wei Wuxian was avoiding several specific people. This was because he always stayed and ate with her when she took the time to make him food, which meant she saw him more than anyone. It took a little longer to realize that while he allowed her to approach, he contrived to be _gone_ if there was a chance appearance from nearly everyone else. 

The first of the people he avoided was Lan Wangji, which struck Jiang Yanli as highly suspicious. While she knew that they’d quarreled recently over Wei Wuxian’s strange new path of cultivation, she couldn’t forget the year Wei Wuxian spent speaking of hardly anyone or anything else. “Lan Zhan” this, “Lan Zhan” that, to the point where Jiang Cheng threatened to throw him into the lotus ponds for refusing to change the topic. Jiang Yanli disagreed with her brother; Wei Wuxian’s affection and attention made him light up with a wistful joy, and she liked nothing more than to see them happy. 

Since Yiling, and his disappearance, Wei Wuxian was so much quieter and prone to keeping secrets. He didn’t laugh. He wasn’t sleeping well or eating much, if not for her efforts. If only the Sunshot Campaign didn’t keep them all so busy, she’d have time to pry the truth out of him. Jiang Yanli knew enough to be concerned, and not enough to allay even one worry. 

It was still better than the months he’d been gone. During that conversation with Jiang Cheng, she never dared voice the fear they both shared. The absolute, certain dread that Wei Wuxian would never have kept them waiting so long. That he could only be dead, and Jiang Yanli had sent Jiang Cheng to find their brother’s body and bring him home. Every day, Jiang Yanli was unspeakably grateful that Wei Wuxian came back to them alive, if not well. Because, though he tried to hide it, Jiang Yanli could see the weight of those three months settling across his shoulders like he carried the ghosts on his own. 

When Jiang Yanli asked the disciples if they’d seen him—even Hu Jianhong, who was an unobtrusive presence at worse—she only ever got a series of negative responses. So, Wei Wuxian was also avoiding the disciples. She quickly modified this assumption to include the disciples of every clan, once Jiang Yanli heard Li Jun try to make excuses for Wei Wuxian. He said that their first disciple was confident in their ability to handle themselves. It was less alarming when put that way, until she thought about the implications. 

Wei Wuxian had no confidants. Not even Jiang Yanli. He hadn’t been able to keep secrets from her before, and now there was so much unspoken between everyone that the weight threatened to crush them all. That, more than anything, kept her up at night. 

Then there were Wen Qing and Wu Xue, both of whom had been traveling with Wei Wuxian when he finally came back. Both women shook their heads when Jiang Yanli asked about Wei Wuxian’s presence each day, and Wen Qing’s backhanded concern about his health didn’t make things better. 

“If he doesn’t stop running away from me, the needles are next,” Wen Qing had said, while Wu Xue busied herself with every task that didn’t require speaking. “He can’t afford to keep running around everywhere without a care in the world.”

“Is that really necessary?” Jiang Yanli had asked her at the time.

“I think he’s doing a good job of fooling people who don’t look too closely, or need him to be strong for their sake,” Wen Qing had said, only half to her and with her eyes averted. Indirectly, it was a scathing indictment of almost everyone involved in the Sunshot Campaign. “But I’m looking for cracks.” 

“Yiling,” said Wu Xue, in the middle of placing a bowl of peanuts on the table. “Wen Chao’s escort. The inn.” 

“There’s no amount of destructive power that miraculously removes basic needs,” Wen Qing countered. “Even with his methods.”

“What happened in Yiling?” Jiang Yanli had asked, alarmed by their sidelong argument. Rumors swirled day in and day out around every aspect of the campaign, but Jiang Yanli kept her ears open specifically for the stories around her clan and her brothers. It was self-defense. 

Wen Qing’s brow had furrowed faintly, and then she asked, “Did…none of them explain?” 

And, between Wen Qing and Wu Xue, Jiang Yanli _finally_ heard how her brother had single-handedly killed the Yiling supervisory office’s second garrison. Neither of them were particularly good storytellers, but they had the same affinity for blunt truths and only minimal attempts to spare her feelings. Neither were squeamish. Perhaps they both thought it was better to know than to leave her guessing. 

Jiang Yanli appreciated it, even as the story put Wei Wuxian’s behavior in a new light. 

Hearing that story, and remembering the ghastly pale of his face and the way he’d clearly been worn thin by his experiences, Jiang Yanli’s fear formed a low note in the back of her head like the ringing sound of silence. Not fear _of_ him—Jiang Yanli wasn’t capable of that—but a deep-seated concern for both his new cultivation methods and his idea of how to handle it.

Wei Wuxian also avoided Jiang Cheng, but she hadn’t known that until this afternoon. While only sect leaders and their seconds were explicitly invited to the strategy meetings, Jiang Cheng was nowhere near ready to try managing those conversations entirely on his own. Jiang Yanli would’ve done it for him, but in this role she’d make a poor substitute for Wei Wuxian—their clan’s _actual_ first disciple. Jiang Cheng needed his heir, his brother, and his second-in-command to be on his side when he faced off with the leaders of the army, even if Wei Wuxian was still recovering. He’d name no one else as his first disciple, as long as they both lived. 

All of this added up to a net made entirely of trouble, and Jiang Yanli didn’t know where to start untangling it to pull both of her brothers safely back to shore.

But she did know it centered on Wei Wuxian. 

“Find A-Xian, but discreetly,” she told a few disciples, mere moments after Jiang Cheng told her about the strategy meeting he was attending alone. Anything to get the nervousness out of the air. “That way everyone can save a little face.” 

“Permission to drag him back?” asked Hu Yating, who lingered after most of the group scattered. “Because at this point, it sounds like that’s what it’s gonna take.” 

“…Try to be gentle about it,” Jiang Yanli hedged, a little guilty. 

“He’s avoiding _all of us.”_ Hu Yating put her hands on her hips and huffed. Her thin face pinched a little tense around her eyes and mouth, which was unfortunately a common expression over the last six months. “If he doesn’t have Suibian— _again_ —I might need help with any physical dragging, but I can definitely talk his ear off.” 

Jiang Yanli used to know. She was less sure of her judgment now. “Tell him A-Cheng needs him. No dragging will be necessary.” 

Hu Yating gave her a bow before running off. 

“Jiang-guniang,” said Wu Tao, who was still there, “Should someone stay behind? Jiejie and I aren’t the best fliers.” 

Wu Tao saw his own abilities correctly. He’d arrived at the right moment to help protect her clan’s future, and for that the Jiang owed him their gratitude. It wasn’t his fault that the Jiang were also collectively confused as to what to do with him. Jiang Yanli had never met a young man who combined power, a self-effacing personality, small stature, and strange knowledge all in the way that he did. 

“Wu-shimei will search on the ground, too. I hope you don’t mind searching the hills if A-Xian isn’t inside the walls.” Here, Jiang Yanli paused, trying to decide which way to word the request. The Wu siblings had many skills in common, but speaking to people was not among them. “Wu-shidi—A-Cheng won’t ask for this, but I need you to go to the meeting and tell A-Xian everything you hear before he walks into that hall. He’s missed too much of it already.” 

“Of course, Jiang-guniang.” Wu Tao bowed deeply, and he disappeared in a flurry of purple robes. He was gone before Jiang Yanli could come up with any extra instructions. 

Wu Xue, meanwhile, stood at attention with a perfectly neutral expression and her arm resting against her dao. Unlike Lan Wangji, who held himself tense from concern around Wei Wuxian in a way Jiang Yanli could easily read, Wu Xue’s attention only wavered when her brother was in view. Right now, she kept her eyes on Jiang Yanli with slightly off-putting intensity. 

“Did you have a question, Wu-shimei?” 

Wu Xue angled her head slightly to one side, as though listening to some unheard song, then told them in her stilted tones, “No, I do not.” And with that, she set off across the compound, in the direction of the gates.

A little wrong-footed by the blunt response, Jiang Yanli turned her attention back to the woman who remained. 

Wen Qing watched Jiang Yanli carefully, though the doctor remained as unbowed as an empress. There was a brittleness to her proud front—worry for Wen Ning wore her thin, and she hadn’t regained the weight she lost while imprisoned—but she didn’t flinch from Jiang Yanli’s attention. The purple robes she wore did only so much to dissuade other cultivators’ suspicions, but they didn’t matter. With her duties among the healers completed for the day, she was effectively a Jiang disciple until sunset. 

“Shall we?” Jiang Yanli asked, though it was admittedly for the sake of courtesy. 

Wen Qing nodded, and they left on their search. 

“None of us have any idea where he might be,” Wen Qing said, puncturing the pretense of a pleasant walk anywhere outside of the Unclean Realm. “Better start looking.” 

Qinghe’s mountains and hills were lined primarily with scrub and sheer cliffs that pierced the view with bare stone. The intimidating face of the Unclean Realm and the Nie’s other fortress-like outposts blended in better among the extremes of this landscape than they would in most other provinces. In many ways, it was a desert compared to the interlocking lotus lakes where Jiang Yanli was born and raised. No one nestled this far into the mountains needed to watch river patterns like the Jiang, and the foliage left few places for anyone to hide from cultivators patrolling from the air. 

Not that the Jiang would do that; Jiang Yanli knew them and knew her brothers. They wouldn’t want too much attention pointed their way. Not yet. 

As they walked through the compound and eventually out into the rough roads abutting it, Jiang cultivators reported back to Jiang Yanli and discounted various parts of the main fortress. Li Jun hadn’t seen Wei Wuxian near the archery field, nor had Fang Shufen seen him anywhere on the walls, and Hu Jianhong and Hu Yating didn’t think any of the Nie saber-wielding forces had seen him either. Jiang Yanli already knew he hadn’t been in the main hall, because Jiang Cheng would’ve caught him and dragged him to the meeting personally. Jiang Yanli could also verify that Wei Wuxian had left the guest quarters sometime in the morning, but anything after that was a guess. 

“It’s safe to say he’s officially avoiding more people than he’s speaking to,” said Wen Qing with some annoyance. She frowned as she squinted towards a valley that looked thoroughly manmade. A quarry, perhaps, and human voices rose from that direction. “Leaving Jiang-zongzhu to the mercy of that crowd must be some kind of crime.” 

“A-Cheng can hold his own in an argument,” said Jiang Yanli, with confidence she didn’t entirely feel. 

Jiang Yanli needed to stop for a break twice, and only the sound of a dizi playing in the distance lured her onward. Wen Qing’s hand on her wrist helped, too, but mostly because of her unflappable physician’s calm.

“With Wei Wuxian? I hope he can, after so many years of experience,” Wen Qing replied. “I’d be disappointed in his skills otherwise. But all of _them_ have at least one ally in the—” 

Wen Qing’s voice died in the middle of her sentence, just as they arrived at the top of the hill. 

Wei Wuxian stood at the top of the valley, and at first his distressed body language was all that Jiang Yanli could see. It wasn’t until she finally reached him in a rush, time stretching strangely as her breathing finally slowed, that she realized what they were all looking at. 

The Nie clan and the sect around it held a deep-seated hatred against the Qishan Wen for crimes that began long before the Sunshot Campaign or the conflicts leading up to it. The abuses of Qinghe’s territory and people stretched back at least two full generations, ever since Wen Ruohan’s ascension. Dealing with their predations sculpted the Nie’s nature and scraped the softness out of them like marrow. Not coincidentally, the Nie were some of the strongest cultivators in the entire world. 

They were not the most merciful. 

A ragged line of prisoners in badly-maintained Wen clan colors trickled through the center of the valley, herded in on both sides by Nie men brandishing whips and their signature dao. 

Several former soldiers fell, and the Nie cultivators used those whips, their fists, and shouting to get them staggering back to their feet. 

Jiang Yanli looked around, feeling the knot of revulsion climb into her throat and perch there, silencing her voice. Wen Qing’s fists clenched inside her sleeves as she watched members of her extended family—or even just soldiers who bore her family’s banner—dragged along like misbehaving cattle. Just next to her, Wei Wuxian’s entire body was tense as a bowstring, and he flinched every time the sound of a whip crack reached them. 

Soon enough, the Wen prisoners staggered around the bend with their wardens in tow. The three of them stood on that hill, struck silent by the sight for long moments, and then it was like the world itself took a steadying breath. 

Jiang Yanli looked between Wen Qing and Wei Wuxian, took a deep breath, and made a decision. “A-Xian, you’ve been here this whole time?” 

Wei Wuxian blinked, which was the only sign that his mind had followed her voice. Then he turned to her, eyes a little wild. “Shijie? What are you doing here?” His gaze darted past her to Wen Qing, and he winced again. “And Wen Qing. Is something wrong?” 

Jiang Yanli carefully reshuffled her original ideas of how to start this conversation. Then, “Zewu-jun arrived this morning, so Chifeng-zun called everyone to a meeting. A-Cheng wasn’t able to look for you before it began, so I did.” She couldn’t help but look toward the Wens rapidly disappearing around the curve of the road. Trying to stay out of reach of the whips, and often failing. “And I think we need to talk about what just happened.” 

“Yes, we do,” Wen Qing said, turning to face them both. She bowed. “Now that there are Wen prisoners besides me to consider, Jiang-guniang, I think I need a more active role.” 

Jiang Yanli caught her arms before she could reach the full extent of her bow. “None of that, Wen-guniang. We need everyone at their best, and that definitely includes you.” 

Wen Qing closed her eyes, centering herself. 

Jiang Yanli cast a searching look at Wei Wuxian, who frowned in a way that reminded her of Jiang Cheng and the mountain of stress piled onto his shoulders. She hated that look on his face, especially since he lost the ability to genuinely smile somewhere along the way. This war stripped joy from the world like a snake shed its skin. And all Jiang Yanli could do was try to keep the scales from scattering entirely.

“Jiang-guniang, your clan is only one of many who carry hatred for the Wen clan,” Wen Qing said, “so this isn’t…surprising. I understand why this is happening.”

Jiang Yanli took a few heartbeats to calm her own tumultuous feelings. If this was her clan— 

It wasn’t. It couldn’t be, due to soldiers who probably weren’t even alive anymore. The Wen clan’s hold over Yunmeng was broken, and neither Wei Wuxian or his traveling companions had said much on the topic. Jiang Yanli could go home to a version of Lotus Pier that saw its guardians’ blood shed all over the floor and without fear of reprisal. And yet, the halls would echo in the void left by all the lives lost in its defense. There was no pretending nothing had happened. 

There was no line of defeated Jiang cultivators, hidden away somewhere in Qishan’s back hills. There hadn’t been enough survivors to bother even taking captives. 

The silence between them all stretched until breaking. 

“I should be down there,” said Wen Qing. 

“You should not. And I know no amount of understanding makes it easier to watch,” Jiang Yanli said at last. She folded her hands in front of her. “But I…I worry that if you did go to be with your clan right now, you’ll lose any chance to keep enough standing to actually help them.” 

Wen Qing fixed her with a sharp look, but the defeated set of her shoulders grew still easier to see.

“What are you thinking, Shijie?” Wei Wuxian, who had been carefully holding himself back from saying anything and nearly shaking with the effort, tucked Chenqing into his folded arms. In the harsh light of day, his coloring was even worse. 

There was a fine tremor to his hands that he’d just hidden, tense as anything, and Jiang Yanli knew she wouldn’t get a truthful answer from him if she pressed on it now. Jiang Yanli weighed that truth in her palms and understood, even as she hated the circumstances that led to it. She didn’t know what, if anything, would help steady him when everyone was also suffering. 

“Wen-guniang and I were both thinking,” said Jiang Yanli, “about the future of the war and the Wen. About what we owe her and Wen-gongzi, as the survivors of the Jiang.” 

With a last glance at the corpse-riddled stone, Jiang Yanli began the slow process of leading them back to the Unclean Realm. 

Something in Wei Wuxian’s expression lightened, just barely, as they continued down the path. 

“Do you think I should bring it up during the meeting? That I’m missing right now.” He hid his wince well enough for strangers, but Jiang Yanli caught the way his gaze darted away from either of them and back toward the valley.

Jiang Yanli exchanged looks with Wen Qing. “We need to tell A-Cheng what is happening and get his support early.” Even if her brother was under tremendous stress, Jiang Yanli never doubted he would keep her wishes in mind. He’d always try. All they could do was try, and try, and get back up again to keep trying. “We shouldn’t surprise him in front of everyone.”

“Which will go better if we _have_ some kind of plan. All there is now is your goodwill, and—” Wen Qing’s voice bled bitterness and frustrated pain. “No one in that room wants to protect my people.” 

“Not yet,” Wei Wuxian offered, as a compromise. Something flashed in his eyes like a warning. 

“Your arrival only changes that number by one, Wei Wuxian.” 

“For now,” Jiang Yanli added on, gentler. Even though Jiang Yanli’s experiences with Wen Qing were once limited to the few classes they had together, she liked to think that the two of them had gotten somewhat closer since Wen Qing’s arrival. Perhaps she hadn’t made that clear enough. “You know we’re both on your side, Wen-guniang.” 

Wen Qing looked between them and sighed. She fell into step just behind Jiang Yanli. “Very well. I can be… _patient._ As always.” 

“I’m sorry you have to,” Jiang Yanli said, partly turned toward her.

“It’s nothing new.” Wen Qing drew herself together—dignity and control and lack of better options—and looked for a moment like nothing in the world could touch her. It wouldn’t last, but neither Jiang Yanli or Wei Wuxian would dare contradict her after what they’d all just seen. 

If the prisoners had been Jiang— 

In another world, they might’ve been, and Jiang Yanli would remember that. Even if her clan threw themselves on Wen Ruohan’s mercy, she knew enough of the man’s character at a distance—and through his son’s monstrosity—that there would be no quarter if their situations were reversed. Jiang Yanli liked to think that even the bleeding remnants of her clan retained enough of their original spirit to offer Wen Qing what her own clan’s leader never would. Her mother might’ve shouted something about never sinking to their level, but Jiang Yanli wasn’t her mother. Even Jiang Cheng only carried so much of her seething rage. 

Vengeance was understandable, even admirable in some circumstances. 

Jiang Yanli simply looked at the limits of the world and drew her own line in the sand. Differently than her brothers would, probably, but they all took their clan’s spirit to heart in different ways.

Attempt the impossible, in her own way.

“Shijie, you shouldn’t be out here in the cold for so long,” said Wei Wuxian, as though he’d just become aware that he should say something to break the silence. “You’ll catch something before we even get back.” 

Before, it wouldn’t have taken more than two breaths before he started coming up with jokes or making a spectacle of himself. To distract everyone. Jiang Yanli didn’t know how to tell him she missed and mourned that, and wanted _desperately_ to know what had forced that change. That now she saw the cracks and how much he wouldn’t allow her to help. 

“All right. We shouldn’t keep them waiting.” 

Jiang Yanli hooked her arm into Wei Wuxian’s elbow and almost forced him to guide her back to the compound. While she couldn’t attend the sect leaders’ meeting in his place—or in Jiang Cheng’s place, no matter how much she wished she could take the burden from his shoulders—she could support them both along the way. Hopefully, it would guide them both to better support each other.

They made their way past the Nie clan’s guards without a single untoward comment directed at Wen Qing, but Jiang Yanli and Wei Wuxian were both on guard for it. At this point, Jiang Yanli took any sign of improvement—in almost anything—as a sign to hope. 

She had little choice.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Satomi, Yatsu, and Fuse (and Teikō) derive their names from the 19th-century Japanese novel _Nansō Satomi Hakkenden_ , also known to me as “where the video game _Ōkami_ got it.” They’re also peers of Wataru and Tomoe in the _Catch Your Breath_ side-story arc entitled "The Canine Warriors."  
> 2\. Inuzuka dogs live as long as their humans because I say so. And because they probably have yōkai ancestry. On that note, the word “yōkai” only entered widespread use relatively recently and is in fact a loanword derived from the Chinese term “yāoguài.” An older Japanese term is “mononoke.” The folklore’s a lot of fun, by any name.  
> 2a. Asagi (or Xiaomei/"Little Sister") is an [ Akita](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Akita_\(dog\)) crossbreed.  
> 2b. Teikō (or Xiaodi/"Little Brother") is a [ Tosa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tosa_\(dog\)), also known as the Japanese mastiff.  
> 3.If you’ve ever been in a traditional Chinese medicine shop, you’ll always know the smell. Personally, I never forgot the dried seahorses. Or how expensive ginseng was.   
> 4\. A “wind-cold” is an upper respiratory tract infection…which can be anything from the common cold to a flu to whatever else might make one cough and sneeze. Traditional treatment of the symptoms involves a _lot_ of spices.   
> 5\. For most of Chinese history, social classes were more malleable than Japanese ones thanks to the existence of the civil service examinations. Interestingly, both cultures generally viewed rich merchants as a destabilizing factor in society. 


	11. Pushback

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jiang Yanli and Shinta attempt to have serious conversations as the cosmic timer ticks down.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay! The Sunshot Campaign is...interesting to try to figure out.
> 
> EDITED 2/24/2021: Scenes have been reworked for clarity and for flow.

Tomoe’s days in Qinghe were mostly monotonous after her…disagreement with Wei Wuxian. He was almost certainly avoiding her with the same persistence as he dodged questions and confrontations from just about everyone. Though he was the first disciple of the Jiang sect, he didn’t show up to meetings. Jiang Wanyin occasionally stormed through the guest quarters looking for him, or sent Jiang Yanli on a search of the entire Unclean Realm while everyone of sufficient rank was in strategic meetings. If there was anyone Wei Wuxian avoided _more_ strenuously than Tomoe, it was likely the Gusu Lan sect’s young master in white, which had the result of making both of them nigh-impossible to locate while that cat-and-mouse game continued. 

After failing to actually help find Wei Wuxian at Jiang Yanli’s request—like most of the Jiang not named Jiang Yanli—Tomoe found herself a little irritated. She hadn’t entirely known if the agitation was aimed at him or at her failure, but resolved to think less about it. 

Several people expressed worries about this untenable situation, though mostly when they weren’t aware of or were ignoring her presence. In many conversations, Tomoe contributed approximately the same number of opinions as a small potted plant. Any concern expressed in her presence was not her own, and she wasn’t truly the wronged party in a single part of this convoluted web.

Though she was now even more painfully aware of her inability to speak to all but two people in the Unclean Realm. She’d taken to picking through Wataru and Shinta’s letters to try and compose a response of her own, to have a point of contact who required her to lie fewer times per hour. True, most of her lies to the Sunshot Campaign's forces were the result of allowing assumptions to swirl around her, but it was still deception.

_“Ow.”_

On the other hand, Tomoe preferred to keep busy, and no number of letters would manage that. She’d abandoned the archery field after two days of no-shows besides herself, and had instead decided to put her other neglected skills to work. Few of these involved speaking. 

_“Wu Xue,”_ Wen Qing said, her voice very dry, _“the patient is not your enemy. Today.”_

Tomoe mimicked the monosyllabic, closed-mouthed noise she’d overheard several times from the Lan contingent. Then she set the thick healing paste aside, closing the lid over the lacquered jar. The smell of healing herbs was thick enough to taste.

The patient grimaced, but relaxed a little when Tomoe retreated. 

It said something about her, Tomoe supposed, when she had _less_ bedside manner than a woman as ferocious as Wen Qing. Perhaps the only worse option than Wen Qing was a healer who treated their patient as an object. Or an actual torturer.

In truth, Tomoe was only here because a Jiang sect cultivator needed to escort Wen Qing everywhere in the Unclean Realm. While Tomoe’s initial offer to take Wen Qing as a prisoner was not _entirely_ serious, Jiang Wanyin doubled down on the claim made during Wei Wuxian and Tomoe’s Yiling campaign. As a result, Wen Qing kept busy among the healers while shadowed by a cultivator in purple. 

Tomoe only counted by technicality. 

_“Excuse me, Wen-guniang,”_ said the man lying on the cot, _“but could you please take care of me instead?”_

Wen Qing shooed Tomoe away from the poor Nie cultivator, allowing her to take up a position near the tent’s main entrance. It didn’t mean too much—Wen Qing was still a prisoner and Tomoe still wasn’t an adept conversationalist—but any indication of people softening their stances toward a Wen was to be encouraged. Wen Qing had said as much, repeatedly, while speaking in hushed tones with both Jiang Wanyin and Jiang Yanli. They wanted as much influence as possible for their plans.

Tomoe was a worthy counterweight in most day-to-day interactions just by behaving as she normally would. Most people would throw themselves at Wen Qing’s feet once they knew Tomoe, and it wasn’t even because of her birthplace.

_“Ow! I think I might be bleeding…more?”_

_“Flinch a little to the left next time,”_ said Wen Qing, merciless as ever. _“This line of stitches is the only reason your arm still works.”_

Changing primary healers didn’t have much of an impact on this particular man’s suffering. On the positive side of things, he’d keep the use of his sword hand as long as he obeyed Wen Qing’s instructions. 

Changing minds was the work of a lifetime, but the best time to start was always sooner rather than later. 

Tomoe spent the next few hours bustling Wen Qing from place to place. Those most hostile to her assistance were, of course, the clans who had been most brutally mauled by the main branch of the Wen sect. Aside from the Lanling Jin heir’s token force, this wronged group comprised…most of them. Tomoe didn’t have to stay in any of the common areas for more than a few minutes before the litany of complaints reached her ears. 

The exception was the Jiang sect; while they were clearly all devastated by the loss of their home and so many of their loved ones, their new clan leader’s word was law. 

And thus, Wen Qing would be protected.

If Jiang Wanyin decided that Tomoe was the best-suited for this task, she’d keep her disagreements to herself. If he brought Shinta to their next battle and left Tomoe behind, however, this compliance would not last long. Tomoe knew perfectly well which of the two of them was best suited for causing death. She’d killed her first man long enough ago that she couldn’t remember details.

 _“That was the last patient,”_ Wen Qing said as the sunlight tipped toward a hazy yellow. While untying her sleeves, she said in a cool tone, _“Did you find anything suspicious enough in my conduct to report to Chifeng-zun?”_

Tomoe tilted her head to one side, meeting Wen Qing’s challenging stare without changing her expression. She reported to no one but her own conscience, and both of them knew it. Even wearing the Jiang sect uniform didn’t change that.

_“Thought not. Our next task is to find food.”_

Tomoe nodded along and helped the taller woman pack her medical supplies. 

Wen Qing tucked her acupuncture needles away, holding herself forcibly calm due mostly to the bustle of the camp around them. Wen Qing already knew Tomoe’s various criteria for violence and that she fit none of them, so all the tension was due to the volatile nature of a crowd—an army—of people with many reasons to hate any Wen they found. 

The pair of them passed quickly through the common areas toward the Jiang sect’s quarters, with Wen Qing’s head held high and Tomoe’s sword ready to intercept those who accosted her. Even with both of them in borrowed Jiang uniforms, the attention of the rank and file when Wen Qing arrived was almost entirely focused on her. The return of Wei Wuxian was greeted with correspondingly overpowering relief. 

Tomoe, the most nondescript by far, slipped into the ranks with no ongoing interest.

And if Tomoe used the creeping dread of her killing intent like one of Wen Qing’s acupuncture needles against the minds of Lanling Jin disciples, no one had to know but her. They were the ones most likely to spit at or harangue Wen Qing despite her work—and despite their lack thereof. As such, their time was better spent _elsewhere._ Anywhere Tomoe did not have to deal with them. 

Wen Qing’s quarters were only secluded in the loosest sense. She shared a courtyard and covered pavilion in the common area with most of the Jiang who’d returned to Qinghe, but the various cultivators had reshuffled around her as they moved from shift to shift. During the last great scramble for rooms, Tomoe moved her possessions into the room next to Wen Qing’s and found Shinta following the next day. 

If Tomoe was going to take someone prisoner, it would be done _correctly._ With no hysterics.

 _“You never did ask me again,”_ Wen Qing said, once they were in her rooms again and well away from the judgment of strangers. 

_“What?”_ Tomoe asked, because the word almost fit the whole of the question she felt was needed. She was efficient with her words even now. 

_“About the men from Dongying. The ones you were oh so interested in when we first met.”_ Wen Qing sorted objects in the room as she spoke. Mostly, this involved putting various medical supplies in the same drawers, holsters, or boxes in which they’d started the day. _“I expected an interrogation.”_

Tomoe, already moving to help Wen Qing stow her elixirs in a box with cushioned spacers, took a long time to answer. She kept thinking as Wen Qing directed the general reorganization of the room, no matter what she had to lift or shift around. After as much time as they’d spent together, at least Wen Qing was outwardly patient with the pace of Tomoe’s replies and even seemed to enjoy thoughtful silences if there was payoff at the end. She didn’t just keep talking and expect to be interrupted later. 

_“Questions are difficult,”_ Tomoe said at last, as Wen Qing started to settle. _“And you are not expendable.”_

That clearly brought Wen Qing’s thought processes to a halt, though she continued her work. The only true giveaway was the hitch from her golden core and the marginally increased intensity of her stare. Most other people would never see through her iron self-control. 

It took until Wen Qing sat at her low table, with Tomoe gathering the tea set Qinghe Nie left and placing it in front of her, before there was any reply. 

The pace of their conversation would have driven more speed-focused cultivators to distraction. 

Finally: _“I am still of Qishan Wen. There are plenty of people here who would use that as their justification for whatever treatment I might receive.”_

Tomoe sat at the table across from her, pouring tea slowly for each of them. _“Trash.”_

Wen Qing blinked. _“Excuse me?”_

 _“We are in war. Men become monsters here.”_ Tomoe untied Yukishiro from her belt and set it on the floor, in plain view of Wen Qing. The words still came out with the rhythm of blows from an axe, but they arrived nonetheless. _“Such people are still trash.”_

Wen Qing watched her for a long moment, relaxing only marginally when she took hold of her teacup. _“...You don’t see the point in torture?”_ she hazarded.

 _“Waste of time,”_ Tomoe replied, all too aware that she was butchering the language by daring to speak faster. In her head, she grumbled, _Torture gives me nothing that raiding a regional office doesn’t already offer._

More importantly, cultivators with powerful cores tended to have _loud_ deaths, especially if she was clumsy enough not to kill on the first blow. It made for an inefficient ambush. She had neither the time nor the inclination to sit around and question people for hours on end. Her targets died quickly, if not as cleanly as _they’d_ like. If she went around cutting up anyone who could potentially give her a lead, she’d never get anything done. 

Wen Qing took a long sip of her tea. _“You should know that Wen-zongzhu has no such qualms. Nothing even approaching restraint.”_

Tomoe expected as much, and said so with a flat look.

 _“He used to. Once upon a time, he was only ambitious and cruel, not indiscriminately so. Now that he’s attacked so many clans and caused so many deaths, he’ll happily do it again and again and again.”_ Wen Qing’s gaze remained fixed on the tabletop. _“Especially without me there stabilizing his qi.”_

 _“Already wasted,”_ was Tomoe’s reply, thinking of the cell in Yiling, _“while imprisoned.”_

Wen Qing’s fist clenched, sending a line of tension all the way up her arm. _“And if we’re lucky, he thinks I’m too dead for A-Ning to still be—“_ She swallowed hard, then pretended that she hadn’t. _“I hope he’s been forgotten. A-Ning is better off lost than with Wen-zongzhu’s attention.”_

 _“If needed,”_ Tomoe said carefully, _“I will ask.”_

 _“Ask what? About A-Ning? No one here can tell you anything.”_ Wen Qing’s hopelessness leached into her qi as clearly as blood in water. _“Even after I spoke to the prisoners, there’s no trail.”_

 _“No trail. Permission from Jiang-zongzhu.”_ Tomoe hesitated for a few heartbeats, trying to find the correct words. Someday, it would be easier to speak from the heart. For now, it was easiest to focus on the ongoing task of dealing death. _“To kill Wen-zongzhu. Myself.”_

Wen Qing froze down to her golden core.

Tomoe took the opportunity to drain her cup of tea in a few quick swallows, despite the near-painful heat. She needed to prepare for the day’s remaining tasks regardless of Wen Qing’s reaction. With that thought in mind, she also refilled Wen Qing’s cup at the same time as her own. 

_“Wu Xue.”_ Wen Qing said it carefully, as though stepping out onto ice with no idea if it would crack under her feet. _“There is an army of cultivators whose goal is exactly that.”_

 _“Yes.”_ Unconcerned, she drew an unfinished letter from her sleeve and got to her feet to look for writing supplies. She’d tidied this room at least once, so she knew where almost everything was.

Wen Qing’s voice did not become less disbelieving. _“Including Chifeng-zun, who has claimed since his ascension that Wen-zongzhu killed his father.”_

Tomoe hadn’t known that, but declined the opportunity to tell Wen Qing about her ignorance. Nie Mingjue had more than enough reason to seek vengeance on Wen Ruohan, but Tomoe thought there was a decent chance the leader of the Sunshot Campaign didn’t have the luxury of caring who killed him anymore. Tomoe didn’t think she’d be picky at all if someone else also struck at her targets, but thus far no one had. She had the means, motive, and opportunity many did not. Thus, she set the thought aside.

Wen Qing went on, exasperated, _“And you mean to tell me you can offer to kill the strongest cultivator in the world, behind his armies and possibly while within his stronghold at Nightless City? All this because I was worrying over A-Ning where you could hear me.”_

 _“Yes. And no.”_ Tomoe tilted her head to one side as a relatively weak golden core approached the mostly-empty Jiang quarters. It was the only distraction from finding that pathetic excuse for a response letter. _“My goal is there. Practical.”_

Wen Qing put her head in her hands, letting out a deep sigh, and refused to lift her gaze until the visitor finally arrived with a gentle knock on the door. It was quite clear that Tomoe would get no further information from her today, so she rose gracefully to answer the summons. 

_“Ah, Wu-shimei,”_ said Jiang Yanli, as Tomoe held out her hands to receive the lunch try. Once her arms were free, Jiang Yanli bowed more than was strictly necessary to a woman who couldn’t dream of outranking her, then said, _“Thank you for looking after Wen-guniang.”_

Tomoe bowed back, then wordlessly carried the tray to the table. 

Wen Qing rose enough to greet Jiang Yanli, who once again defeated them both in the art of making a person remember every failed courtesy lesson over a lifetime. It was a contest she dominated effortlessly, from what Tomoe could understand, while never once behaving in a condescending manner. Jiang Yanli also bore one of the weaker cores of the fully-fledged cultivators, which had the likely-unintentional side effect of giving her the second-hardest qi to read in the entire camp, except for Wei Wuxian. Perhaps her courtesy was as much a shield as other trappings of rank. 

This time, Tomoe sat well back from the two noblewomen, tucking her legs neatly underneath her and rereading her letter. With her hands tucked in her lap and head modestly bowed, she could even meditate for the first time since her archery practice stopped being soothing and simply shifted to frustration. 

Not for the first time, Tomoe shoved down homesickness and pushed it from her mind. It was easier while letting the rhythm of Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli’s quiet conversation—and unsettled qi—wash over her. 

Being the once-fourth child of a samurai clan meant nothing this far from home, in a way that was both freeing and concerning for the future, if Tomoe survived to see the end of the war. While she’d made the assassination offer to Wen Qing, a truly solid plan relied on information not currently available until certain people chose to share. The future remained in flux and the past was a bloodstained banner, broken on the field. At any rate, Sumomo struck her from the clan records within a week of her departure. Disavowing the impending violence helped protect her husband’s clan from any blowback. 

Tomoe never wrote to her sister after leaving, not even to tell her about leaving Nihon’s shores. Never asked about Yūki, who was undoubtedly already training to take up the sword like all his family before him. Couldn’t. 

It didn’t matter. Everything between them had already been said and screamed and buried.

Though…maybe Tomoe should have spoken about funeral arrangements the last time she’d seen Wataru. To clarify. In what little time they had.

She couldn’t send him such an incomplete account. She needed more paper for rewriting.

_“Wu-shimei, please join us. This concerns you, too.”_

Tomoe lifted her head and obeyed, choosing the seat that put her back toward the rear window of the room instead of the door. It was not the most secure position—Wen Qing had _her_ back to the bed—but sufficed.

 _“Thank you.”_ Jiang Yanli spooned soup into bowls for all three of them. At a glance, it looked like Hubei cooking down to the literal bones. Pork rib, in fact. As she settled back into her seat, she said, _“Now, I’d like to ask a few questions of both of you. I understand if you need some time to answer, Wu-shimei, but I’d like you to be honest with me.”_

Tomoe hid a grimace through sheer force of will. Whether she knew or not, Jiang Yanli’s tone reminded Tomoe of her mother at her most patient. And even in one of Tomoe’s mother’s more playful moods, she’d still offered to have Shinta killed during their disastrous—and futile—courtship. For the potential crime of being an unworthy husband. Tomoe truly was her mother’s daughter.

The tension was thick enough to cut, and not all of it was entirely earned by those in the room. 

And Jiang Yanli asked, _“How are you settling in?”_

Entirely unplanned, Wen Qing and Tomoe exchanged a cautious glance. While neither could see a trap, exactly, Tomoe noticed the way the faint alarm in Wen Qing’s expression mirrored what she felt. They almost immediately looked back toward Jiang Yanli. 

_“We’ve all been busy,”_ said Jiang Yanli, _“but details are where it all falls apart. Please tell me if you have any concerns.”_

Tomoe said, _“The war.”_

At the same time, Wen Qing said, _“I can’t complain.”_

They eyed each other again. 

_“Do you want to start, or should I?”_ Wen Qing asked, a little tartly.

 _“You.”_ Tomoe bowed her head slightly.

While Wen Qing and Jiang Yanli moved past pleasantries and into a day-to-day recounting of their respective duties, Tomoe eventually located the least-important of Wen Qing’s ink sticks and a suitable brush. She’d have to remember to replace what she used so Wen Qing could continue keeping patient records, but sometimes it was helpful to put her calligraphy lessons to use where her other language skills failed.

She could at least manage a doodle.

 _“Progress is simply slow, Jiang-guniang. There is no way to force people to trust me. All we can do is work, every day, to bring the war closer to its end.”_ Wen Qing’s chopsticks clicked together. _“Most of the soldiers I treat will live, and they’ll go on to kill more Wen, or come back injured or dead, and the process repeats again and again. At least it keeps me busy.”_

 _“I suspect your experiences with Wen-zongzhu were rather different.”_ That was a very diplomatic way of putting it. 

_“I was a member of his court. Very little is the same,”_ Wen Qing hedged.

Tomoe drew several characters in neat, swift strokes, then frowned. She was almost entirely certain she had failed to make a sentence by local standards. Better to stick to forming a small lexicon she could use independent of their combined meaning. So, she wrote a dozen more relevant nouns.

Jiang Yanli waited until Tomoe finished writing before saying in her soft voice, _“What about you, Wu-shimei?”_

 _“Quiet,”_ Tomoe said after skimming her list of characters. _“Irrelevant.”_

_“Do you prefer being very far from the center of attention?”_

Tomoe bobbed her head once, but only said, _“Futile.”_

 _“Unfortunately, I agree.”_ Wen Qing sighed into her bowl, barely noticeable. 

Tomoe concentrated on appreciating Jiang Yanli’s cooking with some caution. While Hubei cuisine was almost never as overpoweringly spicy as the other possibilities—mostly from Sichuan—Tomoe only needed to learn that lesson _once._ Her palate wasn’t built for surviving that trial.

 _“Now, wait. I don’t believe the situation is entirely out of our hands.”_ Jiang Yanli drew herself up slightly, mouth set in determination. _“Wen-guniang, would you object to joining my retinue? A-Cheng won’t argue—”_

 _“I stood by and wouldn’t have helped you three, if not for A-Ning making the decision for us both,”_ Wen Qing interrupted quietly. _“I don’t deserve—”_

 _“You still helped us, Wen-guniang. You hid us from Wen Chao’s forces long enough to restore A-Cheng’s golden core,”_ Jiang Yanli insisted, her spine as straight as a jian. _“There would be no Jiang clan today without you, even if you say your intentions were less than perfect. I like to think—”_ Jiang Yanli paused so she could draw a steadying breath, then continued, _“—I’d like to think we can still help each other. Even if I can’t go out and help rescue Wen Ning, or to even find him, he was very kind to us._ You _were kind, when you didn’t truly have to be. You deserve better. I’m sorry I never stood up for you the way you deserved.”_

Tomoe felt the knife’s edge of guilt draw a sharp line through Wen Qing’s qi and pretended not to notice. Right around the moment Jiang Yanli mentioned that golden core. Well, now. 

_“Please, Wen-guniang. I already offered to help, and now I ask that you take it.”_

Wen Qing turned her face away. Still, when Jiang Yanli reached across the table and took her hand, she squeezed back just slightly. 

_“Wen-guniang. Jiang-guniang,”_ Tomoe said, into the long silence. _“Question.”_

Jiang Yanli drew back into herself, just a little. Her presence was no smaller than before, but she let go of Wen Qing’s hand and settled back into a polite listening posture as Wen Qing recovered. 

_“I will fight. Wen-guniang will not. Jiang-guniang will not,”_ Tomoe tried. 

It was less a condemnation than an observation. Healers like Wen Qing often took vows to cause no harm—which had a few loopholes—and Jiang Yanli was not strong enough to wield a jian in battle even if she wanted to. The sentences came out as rigid as a marching song, but Tomoe hoped the impact was a little softened by her clear lack of experience speaking aloud. 

_Ugh._ She should have made more of an effort with the Shanghai tutor. 

_“Is the jian the only…?”_ Tomoe waved a hand, trying to find the correct word. _“Other ways. Other paths.”_ It took Tomoe an embarrassingly long time to remember the term for “weapon,” though she said it as soon as she dragged it out of the depths of her brain. 

Wen Qing’s _“What do you mean?”_ was just as blunt as Tomoe tried not to be.

As often. 

_“Many weapons. All channel qi.”_ Tomoe flipped her notes around and drew their attention to the series of untidy ink drawings at the bottom. _“Dao. Bow. Spear. Dagger.”_

 _“I see where your language lessons stopped,”_ said Wen Qing. 

Tomoe pointed toward herself with one hand, even as she made her way through the rest of the list. _“I wield these.”_ Switching to Nihongo, she recited the name of each piece. “Katana. Naginata. Tantō. Yumi. Tessen.” 

_“This just looks like a hand fan,”_ Jiang Yanli said. _“Is there something special about it?”_

 _“Steel.”_ Tomoe lost all of her personal weapon collection years ago, but she couldn’t be too sentimental about it while she still kept Yukishiro. Had any of the other pieces survived the fire, she likely would have sold them off for cash, like her wedding robes. _“Steel struts and panels.”_

 _“You can’t solve every problem with violence.”_ Wen Qing wasn’t precisely disapproving. More skeptical. 

_“War,”_ Tomoe reminded them. _“Can so.”_

Jiang Yanli looked between them before putting her head in her hands. _“Oh no.”_

Wen Qing reacted first. _“Jiang-guniang?”_

 _“I was—I was just about to say, ‘not now, you two,’ like with A-Cheng and A-Xian.”_ Her smile failed at the corners. Her kind face was faintly lined with exhaustion. _“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt.”_

 _“You can’t interrupt a conversation like this one. It’s impossible.”_ Wen Qing looked down at her bowl again. _“Jiang-guniang, I’ll think about your offer. It’s more than I deserve.”_

 _“No offense meant to you, Wen-guniang, but the lives of my brothers are very important to me. I’m just sorry I can’t do more right now.”_ Jiang Yanli then turned her attention back to Tomoe. _“And Wu-shimei? I’ll do my best to think about…alternative cultivation methods.”_

Tomoe supposed it wasn’t especially time-critical for Jiang Yanli to learn how to bounce a dao back into the owner’s face with a fan. That was, theoretically, the job of the actual army bloating the Unclean Realm’s population. She clearly hadn’t gone through the same martial training as many of the cultivators here, though Tomoe didn’t entirely rule out talisman or flight potential. In many ways, anything Tomoe might teach her was not going to be a priority.

But Tomoe had offered targeted violence on behalf of Wen Qing, and taught Shinta almost every kenjutsu technique she’d ever learned. She handed Yukishiro to Wei Wuxian and still scared him away in less than ten minutes, despite his new language proficiency. Jiang Wanyin needed her killing power, and that was the cleanest summary of what she could contribute to the war. 

In the end, Tomoe was the sum of her skills. The Heavens knew she had little else to give besides misery.

 _“Let’s finish our meal. We can talk about this after giving ourselves some time to think.”_ With that, Jiang Yanli leaned over the table and uncovered the soup pot again. _“Seconds, anyone?”_

Tomoe and Wen Qing silently agreed and moved their bowls into her reach.

And that evening, Tomoe’s letter to Wataru became three times as long as any she’d thought of before. If she had practical requests, it seemed less like she was writing so much solely to make up for lost time.

* * *

_“Wu Tao!”_

At the sound of Jiang Wanyin’s voice, both Shinta and Li Jun snapped to attention as though ice water trickled down their necks. 

_“Does your sister still hate flying?”_ asked Jiang Wanyin, not long after yet another meeting Shinta hadn’t attended. Aside from the rogue cultivators who were still appearing in Qinghe and being slowly absorbed by the Jiang, Shinta had little seniority and no grounds to seek more information. 

_“No one’s seen any improvement,”_ Shinta said, which was not the same as blatantly admitting that Tomoe harbored weakness. At the very least, it was less likely to insult her pride to say that she hated flying than if Shinta told Jiang Wanyin outright that she couldn’t travel that way without bouts of horrible nausea. 

Even if every Jiang knew that already.

 _“She almost threw up on me,”_ Li Jun complained under his breath. 

_“Then you’re coming with the advance force, and she’s staying with the main army.”_ Jiang Wanyin ignored Li Jun’s response entirely. Instead, he crossed his arms with every appearance of agitated impatience. _“We don’t entirely know what we might find in Qishan. I want you there.”_

 _“Of course, Jiang-zongzhu.”_ Not that Shinta could do any less than agree in front of witnesses. Even so, he hoped Jiang Wanyin planned on telling Tomoe about this development.

_Oh, who am I kidding? He’s going to make me do it._

_“What about me?”_ asked Li Jun, even as Shinta kept his head bowed. 

_“You’re sticking with Wei Wuxian and A-Jie. Don’t let me down.”_ A fraction of the tension in Jiang Wanyin uncoiled when speaking of his siblings. 

It might have also been that he’d known Li Jun for years and was just painfully awkward around anyone without that level of familiarity. There was only so much bluster anyone could manage. Everyone who walked into the meeting hall for strategy discussions knew that Jiang Wanyin was the least-experienced sect leader and the one with the fewest disciples to bring to any battle. Even with the recent recruitment and the trickle of survivors, the Jiang had more to prove— 

_“Wu Tao, go inform your sister of my decision. She’ll have to get used to working with people eventually.”_ Jiang Wanyin said it with confidence as fragile as a bubble, though what truly gave him away was the flash of fear in his qi.

 _“Should I direct complaints back to you?”_ Shinta asked, hiding his amusement by angling his face toward the ground politely.

On cue, there was a second burst of fear. _“No! Don’t you dare!”_

No one got out of that conversation with their dignity entirely intact. 

With that backhanded command in his head, Shinta set off to search the entirety of the Unclean Realm for Tomoe, because she never let anyone know where she was going before she was already somewhere else. While Shinta didn’t know that much about shinobi—or what Tomoe might have learned from Hatake’s underlings after scaring off the language tutor—he suspected she was more accomplished at hiding than her family’s old titles implied. It was harder to sneak up on cultivators than other people. 

That did not mean it was impossible. Or that Tomoe hadn’t found her way into rafters and crawlspaces without anyone finding out. She was only expected to stay around Jiang Yanli and Wen Qing so often and didn’t have a lot of other responsibilities. Jiang Wanyin knew some of her weaknesses, but probably not all of her strengths. 

After about half an hour of searching, Tomoe’s qi remained elusive while Shinta paced the length of the Unclean Realm. While he didn’t quite have the Lan knack for speedwalking and fluttering artistically everywhere they went, Shinta managed to avoid drawing too much attention. Silent footfalls and a servant’s gait did the bulk of the work. 

Which was why and how Shinta eventually circled back to the Jiang quarters, soles worn thinner and patience a little strained. Within fifty paces of him, regardless of walls, a handful of golden cores stood out in his mental map of the area. A distressed Jiang Yanli and frustrated Lan Wangji were about ten paces apart, along with a scattered handful of Jiang cultivators who were napping from the low ebb of their qi— 

Shinta caught a black blur rushing from the Jiang quarters’ main door. 

_“Lan Zhan, listen to me—”_

Getting used to Wei Wuxian’s total lack of a golden core was clearly an ongoing task. Shinta turned the corner, opening his mouth to call out a polite greeting to the young man who outranked him about ten times over, and felt the words die at the first sound of steel hitting bamboo. 

In the time it took for Shinta to arrange himself like a coincidental interloper—because otherwise he was likely to interfere, and Tomoe didn’t _want_ him to get involved in cultivator squabbles—the fight stumbled to a halt. 

Wei Wuxian’s eyes shut in anticipation of pain just as Lan Wangji’s arm came to a stop, fully extended and his sword’s point resting in the hollow of Wei Wuxian’s throat. 

_“Hanguang-jun,”_ Shinta heard himself say, sharper than even he expected. So much for staying out of this. _“What are you doing?”_

Both of their heads whipped his way, as though he was the one who’d decided to stab an ally. In the time it took for Shinta to approach, hand on his katana and expression steely, Lan Wangji had sheathed his sword and Wei Wuxian had pasted a smile to his face. Their qi was deeply unsettled for different reasons; Lan Wangji bled uncertainty and concern while barely tilting his head, and Wei Wuxian was a shadow by comparison. And yet for the first time, Shinta held at least half a notion of confronting either. 

_“Wu-shidi,”_ said Wei Wuxian, because Lan Wangji hadn’t been a master of quick excuses in the two months Shinta had spent around him, _“Lan Zhan was just…testing my reflexes. I’ve been slacking.”_

Lan Wangji gave him a look out of the corner of his eye that, apparently, neither of them thought Shinta would catch. 

_“That’s interesting,”_ said Shinta, _“because there are better places to spar than a side courtyard.”_ He blew out a slow breath. _“And if the two of you are just fighting…”_

Honestly, Shinta wasn’t sure if he intended to end that sentence in any meaningful way. He didn’t want to threaten either of them, and he wasn’t entirely sure if what they were doing was outside of the standard range of behavior for cultivators in a high-pressure situation. The Jiang he’d been around the most were only guilty of snapping at each other verbally when forced to sleep in the rough too many nights in a row. And Lan Wangji, as far as Shinta knew, _only_ became agitated when Wei Wuxian was involved. Maybe everyone was used to this.

Wei Wuxian’s smile faltered, hiding his teeth as the forced laugh failed. _“Wu-shidi, give your shixiong a break! Lan Zhan and I are friends.”_

Lan Wangji looked at Wei Wuxian like he’d just spoken several lines of love poetry. Shinta had no idea if the man even noticed that he angled toward Wei Wuxian like a flower reaching for the sun. But…angry about it.

Shinta removed his hand from his katana as he approached the pair. _“If you’re sure.”_

 _“Of course I’m sure!”_ Wei Wuxian said, affecting offense even as he spun Chenqing in his hand. _“You don’t need to worry so much about your shixiong in the middle of the Unclean Realm, of all places.”_

Wataru and Wei Wuxian would get along, Shinta thought. Both of them preferred making outrageous remarks to actually sharing their honest emotions. Tomoe avoided problems outright. Shinta tried to calm people down. Unlike both, Wei Wuxian and Wataru both had a general air of “I will control _why_ you are angry,” and acted on it to distract everyone from looking closer and seeing them as they truly were. 

Shinta tilted his head back a little to look Wei Wuxian in the eye, then said, _“Forgive this humble shidi for disrespect, but…”_

 _“You’re going to say something terrible,”_ Wei Wuxian guessed. 

_“I wouldn’t say it’s quite so bad.”_ Shinta paused. He shifted his weight onto his back foot, making a point to eye Lan Wangji with his brows furrowed. _“Shixiong, it’s Jiang sect business. I don’t know how much I can say around Hanguang-jun.”_

Lan Wangji’s qi took on a distinctly judgmental, unhappy tinge. Shinta’s accent wasn’t perfect, and he certainly didn’t have the rank to order Lan Wangji to leave. He didn’t even expect Lan Wangji to listen if circumstances were different, because he was just like that. Like a boulder in the middle of a river. 

And now Shinta was trying to lever him out of the way.

In the back of his mind, Shinta thought that he hadn’t made much of an impression on Lan Wangji so far. Months of searching and fighting could be easily swept aside in the face of persistent indifference. Then this happened.

 _“Don’t frown, Lan Zhan. I’ll spar with you for real soon enough,”_ Wei Wuxian assured him, though Shinta wondered if he was hitting a mark he even knew was there. 

Lan Wangji inclined his head, just barely, before turning and striding away. 

As soon as he did, Wei Wuxian slung an arm around Shinta’s shoulders with near-comical ease and half-dragged him into the Jiang sect’s actual quarters. _“So, what was so important that Lan Zhan couldn’t hear it?”_

 _“Oh, right.”_ Shinta let himself be dragged toward Wei Wuxian’s rooms, then admitted, _“It seemed like you needed to escape the conversation.”_

 _“So you made something up?”_ Wei Wuxian frowned even as he finally released Shinta. This allowed them to sit on different sides of a low lacquered table, which was probably worth more than the house Shinta had been born in. 

_“Not entirely. I did need to speak with you, and he did need to leave. It’s just that those two things aren’t truly related.”_ Shinta was careful to sit properly, as a precaution against forgetting a year’s worth of etiquette lessons even once. _“Have you seen Jiejie?”_

 _“Not recently. She’s been mostly with Shijie and Wen Qing. Looking like a caged tiger the entire time.”_ Wei Wuxian toyed with Chenqing again. He sat in an uncaring sprawl, so the tassel dipped and knocked against the table a few times. _“When we finally move out, I don’t think Wen Ruohan is going to enjoy the experience.”_

Shinta had enough of an idea of what Wei Wuxian and his flute were capable of. He was even more aware of Tomoe’s skills. There was a very real part of his mind that shied away from thinking about either. Thus, he let that topic lie. 

_“I was…also going to ask about what happened there. Because it looked like Hanguang-jun almost killed you.”_ At Wei Wuxian’s raised eyebrow, Shinta sighed. _“You didn’t look like you thought he would stop in time.”_

 _“I guess we both had you fooled, then! Lan Zhan would never cut someone who didn’t deserve it.”_ Wei Wuxian leaned back on his hands and added, _“You don’t need to worry about me. Wen Ruohan and his ghost soldiers will.”_

That…was a sentiment with several worrying components. Shinta knew instantly he did not have enough tools to pry this problem open. Though reading Wei Wuxian’s qi told him part of the story, Shinta had only known him for about a week. This was something Jiang Yanli or Jiang Wanyin could deal with.

 _“Speaking of…ghosts, I guess,”_ Shinta said, _“Jiejie told me you did something with her dao.”_ It still felt weird calling Yukishiro anything but a katana, regardless of Jiang Wanyin’s plans to offer a new finish and disguise it. _“Did something else happen?”_

Yukishiro didn’t like most people. Cultivator swords were greedy, but Yukishiro was the only blade that tried to jump out of Shinta’s hand back when he’d just been learning how to fight. Having held fewer than a dozen weapons in his life, he was still certain this was the least of what the katana would do.

 _“Is Wuya-jie missing my attention? She has a face of pure ice, so I wasn’t sure she cared!”_ Wei Wuxian grinned at the end, as though that made him more convincing. _“It’s war. I don’t have time to flirt with her, no matter how pretty she is.”_

Shinta barely even needed to concentrate to tell that was a lie. In Nihongo, he said, “If that’s the only problem, why can you understand me when I talk like this?” 

Wei Wuxian grimaced, shoulders slumping. _“Aiya, that language still gives me trouble. You can’t go spreading that around.”_

_“I was just trying to point out how obvious the problem is. Something changed. I don’t think Jiejie meant to offend you, or—”_

_“There’s no offense! Honestly, everyone knows I’m shameless and reckless and all of that,”_ Wei Wuxian said, waving the hand not holding Chenqing. _“Don’t worry about it. Just because your jiejie and shixiong have to spend time apart doesn’t mean there’s anything seriously wrong.”_

Shinta twisted his fingers against themselves. _“So, I don’t need to worry.”_

 _“Of course not.”_ Defiance coiled up like a waiting viper, buried in Wei Wuxian’s qi.

_“And the language thing is entirely innocent.”_

_“Probably.”_ He waggled his eyebrows. At the same time, his meager qi twisted around into a knot. _“Private lessons, you know.”_

Shinta sighed, keeping his stare level until the suggestiveness fell off of Wei Wuxian’s face.

Wei Wuxian, finally realizing that Shinta wasn’t budging, leaned forward on his elbows. A red gleam appeared in his eyes as though there was a fire lit nearby, but only a chill Qinghe wind blew through the room. _“I honestly expected you to be more offended. Weren’t you married to her once,_ Asakura Isshinta?”

Shinta flinched at the serpent’s strike. Even though Wei Wuxian’s pronunciation was strange and off-putting, hearing that name was like a knife in his ribs. 

_“That dao had a lot to say about your clan.”_ Wei Wuxian spun Chenqing around. _“Don’t pry where you’re not wanted. Just some friendly advice from your shixiong.”_

Yes, that—Yukishiro had opinions of its own. 

Shinta’s thoughts moved slowly, as though underwater. 

That made sense. 

Yukishiro had killed so many of his former clansmen by now that of _course_ the blade formed a habit. Katana weren’t usually conscious, but the legendary blades that developed their own will often became outright bloodthirsty. Yukishiro only fell short by the smallest margin. 

It might not, once Tomoe’s work was done.

 _“We have bigger things to worry about.”_ Wei Wuxian got up from the table, quickly disappearing.

Shinta blinked a few times, coming back to himself abruptly. His right hand clamped down over the semicircle scars hidden on his forearm, grounding him through pressure in a way that most people never noticed. 

Wei Wuxian’s voice floated around the corner a moment later, as he called out a greeting to a different Jiang disciple. He took his raw wound of a personal aura with him.

Shinta took a steadying breath.

And another. 

Once his qi was under control and his heart a little calmer, Shinta went to go find Tomoe and give her Jiang Wanyin’s orders as though nothing had happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cultural notes:  
> 1\. Folding fans are unisex accessories in Japan by this time, but were only for men in China for a majority of their history. Nie Huaisang gets a lot of mileage out of his painted fans over the course of the show. Women's fans are silk stretched over shaped frames and do not fold.  
> 2\. The _tessen,_ the Japanese (iron-spoked) war fan, was a samurai accessory used both for indoor combat and directing soldiers in battle.  
> 3\. Sichuan cooking is world-famous for spicy dishes, like a lot of inland cuisines. Hubei, as another inland province, isn’t too far behind on spice levels.  
> 4\. Yukishiro's fairly malevolent nature is based on a number of supposedly cursed swords. It may or may not be exacerbated by having a name, depending on the cultural lens applied.  
> 5\. Shinta's rank is approximately that of an outer disciple. He has seniority over Wei Wuxian by age, but absolutely doesn't if you go by sect rankings. Wei Wuxian switches between modes of address depending on what kind of conversation he's trying to have (or avoid).
> 
> The Jiang's named bit players, with how their names are written in characters. I'm not going to come up with all forty extras for this clan, because my goodness _no one else did._ Including the original author.  
> Hu Jianhong (胡健宏) (age 23)  
> Hu Yating (胡雅婷) (age 21)  
> Fang Shufen (方淑芬) (age 24)  
> Li Jun (黎俊) (age 17)  
> Li Kai (黎凯) (age 10)  
> Li Chun (黎春) (age 13)

**Author's Note:**

> Here's an art [link to the character designs of our gang of OCs](https://cyb-by-lang.tumblr.com/post/630624533852864512/image-description-a-series-of-five-images).  
> Here's the [uncolored version with the courtesy names and everything](https://cyb-by-lang.tumblr.com/post/630374795365793792/image-description-a-series-of-five-image).  
> Here's [Tomoe in particular](https://cyb-by-lang.tumblr.com/post/628463520104775680/image-description-an-image-of-a-woman-wearing).  
> Here's [Tomoe and her future daughter, Kei](https://cyb-by-lang.tumblr.com/post/628117005935984640/image-description-a-pair-of-dark-haired-women).  
> And here's [the note specifically on courtesy names](https://cyb-by-lang.tumblr.com/post/628343963246624768/courtesy-names).
> 
> Feel free to ask any worldbuilding/fandom questions as they pop up. :)


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